With the vast combinations of monitors and video cards that are available at a range of different resolutions, sizes and prices, it is not surprising that there is a large degree of variance in the general marketplace but graphic designers need to work to some reference standards just in the same way that audio engineers work within fairly strict specifications for their recordings. Apple Macintosh computers have been used within the print industry for many years and they have colour management built-in at system level. At the heart of every Mac is something called 'ColorSync' which allows input from scanners and output to colour printers to be viewable with a high degree of confidence on any attached monitor and, although not 100% foolproof because of the fundamental differences in RGB and CMYK, what you see on the screen is more or less what you get when you go to print.

Windows PCs are primarily designed as office machines for word processing, spreadsheets and database work. They are also very price-sensitive. So, there is very little standardisation of colour on monitors. An office PC is not a suitable tool for graphic design simply because you can't trust what you see on the monitor. That's not to say that you have to use a Mac to get accurate colour, in fact a Mac set up for print work is not really suitable for Web design at all. Properly adjusted, any computer and monitor can be used for Web design.

Regardless of the screen size or colour depth, a monitor should display a wide range of colours as predictably as possible, but colours are not always as they seem. If you look at a picture of a zebra in your living room at night and outside your front door at noon, you see the same black and white zebra. If you used a measuring instrument (a colourometer or densitometer) to read absolute values of black and white in these two situations they would be vastly different in colour value and intensity. In the indoor light, the white would warm because it is being illuminated by an incandescent tungsten lamp. Outside in daylight, the white would be much purer.

If you were to take photographs of the picture of the zebra under both conditions on slide film, the difference would be very apparent. When you look at it with your eyes, your brain compensates for the differences and you are almost unaware of the comparative warmth and coolness - called 'colour temperature'. Think of colour temperature as being the colour of a piece of metal heated in a fire. As the heat increases, it goes from dull red, to bright red, to yellow and finally to 'white hot'. There is another big difference in the readings taken from the zebra picture indoors and out. Outside the white will be very much brighter than indoors, in fact, the difference in brightness between the black and white will be many times greater. Black, is just the absence of light, it doesn't change as much as the intensity of light. The difference in intensity between white and black in any given situation is called the 'dynamic range'.

Okay, forget about zebras now and let's consider monitors. The black on a monitor can only be as black as the colour of the screen when it is switched off. You can't shine 'negative light' on anything - or bank robbers would have a field day! So, if your monitor is sitting in a brightly lit room, the colour of the screen - your black - will be brighter than if it were in a dark room. Sometimes you have no choice of working environment, but a dimly lit room is better for making colour and tonal judgements. The brightness of the white on your monitor depends on many factors, the type of tube, the efficiency of the phosphors and the monitors age. A new Sony or Mitsubishi-based tube will be very much brighter than an old shadowmask tube.

Unfortunately, a computer monitor doesn't behave the same way as the human eye when it comes to showing relative tonal values. If you were to display what you knew to be a 50% grey on the monitor, you would expect it to be exactly half way between the black and white in brightness, but it wouldn't be. To get it to appear to be exactly half way between black and white, the monitor has to have something called 'gamma compensation' applied. Instead of a graph plotting brightness between black and white being a straight line, it has to be a curve for all the intermediate tones to have the correct visual relationship.

The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) has decided that, for Web design, an intermediate gamma of 2.2 should be used. It is a good compromise between the 1.8 used in traditional graphics computers and the 2.5 of office machines. It is also the standard used for television production which hit similar problems many years earlier. So, in terms of W3C, to reach some kind of standard for viewing Web graphics on a monitor, we have to consider the Black, the Brightness and Colour Temperature of the White, the inter-relationship of the colours in-between, and the neutrality of the Grey.

Now guess, my last flash design above, has it been done considering all this?. GO and grab your own source of the files in the portfolio section. I am happy to have read it.