From: "Jos Claerbout (Brava Services)"
To: Andrew Levin, Don Ahrens, Kira Ryder, Steven Wasserman, Alvin Lee
Cc: Heather Katner

Subject: My crisis of confidence
Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1999 13:52:24 -0800 

All - 

Some moons ago, I wrote a TV-safe ColorPicker, that would
help users choose NTSC-safe color combinations for their Web pages.
It did this a couple of ways:

1) Making sure no white was over 90% brightness
2) Making sure no single color was more than 80% saturated,
   or 65% if it was a red
3) Making sure that text and background colors opposite each other
   on the color wheel were not both heavily saturated.
4) Keeping the "Y" value of text and background at least 75 point apart.

This pack of kludges seemed to work pretty well,
and we published the ColorPicker at:
http://developer.webtv.net/design/tools/colorpick/

I have been working on 2.0 in spurts for a while now. The interface is
better, the code cleaner, etc. The problem I have is that I don't have
quite so much faith in the internal logic anymore.
Many color combos appear "washed out" when they're desaturated,
even if I twiddle with brightness. 

My whole house of cards wobbled gravely this afternoon
when I visited a page created with PageBuilder.
The background was a 95% saturated red, 40% brightness.
It looked fine on my TV.

At the risk of beginning religious battles, is anyone interested
in helping me hammer out, once and for all, rules for color
on an NTSC television? (I know, I know, Never Twice the Same Color)
I've got a much-improved ColorPicker revving at the gates.

Thanks in advance,

Jos