Color Tutorial

Section 1 - Introduction
Section 2 - Basics
      Your first page
      Formatting
      Text tricks
      Pictures
      Links
      Backgrounds
         Color tutorial
         Background Color
         Background Pictures
         Text Color
         Font
         Link Colors
         Text Decoration
         You Try It
Section 3 - Next Level
Section 4 - Advanced
Section 5 - Publishing
Section 6 - Extras
Appendices

Color tutorial
When you were younger, you probably learned that the primary colors of paint are red, yellow and blue. You can make orange, green and purple by mixing the primary colors together, and every other color by blending different amounts of pigment.

Light comes in three primary colors too. They are red, green and blue. When you mix red and green light, you get yellow. Green and blue mixed make aqua. Red and blue make purple. Again, by changing how much of each color you use, you can get many more colors.

To get colors online, there is a six digit code to get that color. The first two digits are red, the second two are green, and the final two are blue. An example of the code looks like this:

Red	Green	Blue
33	66	99
font color="#336699"
This is color 336699

Let's look at that tag logically. There are lower numbers in the red column, higher numbers in the green column, and highest numbers in the blue column. We can then expect that this color will be mostly blue, kind of a greenish-blue, with not much red in it.

Here's where it gets tricky though. It would be easy to think of this as 33 parts red, 66 parts green, and 99 parts blue, but computers aren't that simple. Because they use binary code, the numbers would have to either be base 8 or base 16. Just by looking at this you can tell that there's a nine, so these numbers must be base 16. Instead of 0-9, the numbers go from 0-F. If you were counting in these numbers, it would be 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F. The number after F would be 10. The number after 19 would be 1A. It takes a lot of thinking to think in base sixteen.

Let's simplify. F is maximum color. I like to think of it as "full color." Zero (0) is no color. If you had the code "000000" that would be black because there is no light at all. If you had the code "FFFFFF" it would be white because a fullness of balanced light is white light. Here is a short table showing some common colors.

000000	Black
FF0000	Red
FFCC00	Orange
FFFF00	Yellow
00FF00	Light Green
009900	Dark Green
00FFFF	Aqua
0000FF	Blue
FF00FF	Purple
666666	Dark Grey
CCCCCC	Light Grey
FFFFFF	White

Look through these and see the logical order to the numbers. By the way, the numbers 0,3,6,9,C and F are most commonly used. The colors made from these number combinations are most common on computer screens.

You don't need to memorize these numbers. There are a lot of places online that will tell you the numbers for various colors. You can also figure out numbers by experimenting. On the box below, clicking on the arrows will change the background color. By clicking on the code letters, you can change them to any figure between 00 and FF. Feel free to try it! There is something you should know though. For some colors, you can just use their name. For example, if you wanted a red, and didn't feel like typing font color="FF0000" you could type font color="red" and it would mean the same. Some colors are easier to remember than others. For example, you probably won't remember "aliceblue" (which is nearly white), but you'll probably remember blue. There are charts online that can tell you the names, but I'll sometimes be using the numbers. They're actually pretty easy once you get the hang of them.