Browse 216 web-safe colors — click to copy
This is a reference chart for the 216 colors that make up the classic web-safe palette. Every swatch is shown at once with its HEX code a click away, which makes it a quick way to pick from a fixed, limited set rather than from the millions of colors a normal picker offers.
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The palette dates from the 1990s, when many monitors could only display 256 colors at once. Anything outside that range got approximated with dithering, which looked rough and varied between machines. The 216 colors here were the set that rendered identically across Windows and Mac systems, so designers stuck to them to keep results predictable.
Modern displays handle millions of colors, so the original technical reason is long gone — you don't need to restrict yourself to this palette for compatibility. It survives for other reasons. It's the fastest way to get an authentically retro look for a design referencing that era. It's a useful constraint: choosing from 216 options rather than 16 million tends to produce a more coherent result, and every value is a memorable pattern of 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF. For everyday work, though, a full color picker will serve you better.
No. Modern screens display far more colors than the palette was designed around, so there's no compatibility reason to limit yourself to it.
Each of red, green, and blue takes one of six values, and six cubed is 216. The remaining slots in a 256-color system were reserved by the operating system, which is why the palette stops short of 256.
The six values per channel are 00, 33, 66, 99, CC, and FF, so every web-safe color is built from those pairs. That regularity is what makes codes like #336699 easy to recognise.
Mostly for retro or nostalgic designs, or when you want a deliberately limited set of colors to work within. For general design work, pick freely with a standard color picker.