Have you ever looked at your website on someone else’s computer and been surprised by the appearance? The colours might be very different, the text size larger or smaller, the contrast greater, the pictures smaller, and more. A number of factors can contribute to the differences.
Colour calibration
Every monitor has a different colour calibration. Monitors allow you to change your colour settings using a menu right on the screen, or via some hardware tabs along the edge of the monitor.
Add some differences in the way Contrast and Brightness have been set up on the monitor, and you have quite a few possible differences in the way colours might look. In addition, some Macs may still have the 1.8 gamma setting instead of the web standard 2.2. Similar to a 100-watt versus 60-watt lightbulb, this means the Mac screens appear much brighter than PC displays.
Text size
The size of the text on your website depends to a great extent on the size of the monitor screen and its resolution setting. Every monitor has a countable number of pixels in rows and columns. One monitor might have 1920 pixels or light points across, and 1200 pixels up and down. Another one might only display a maximum of 1280 x 1024 pixels.
Browsers
Browsers account for quite a few differences in appearance. Comparing the appearance of a website on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome, the text will appear heavier or finer; darker or paler; more or less widely spaced. Links might appear underlined in one browser and not underlined in another. A dotted line might or might not appear around an image; a scroll bar might or might not appear in a window; text might wrap around an image.
These variations are particularly challenging for artists and photographers because they know the exact colour, tone and shade of their original work.
When we create a site for you, we spend quite a bit of time testing your pages on different monitors, on different devices like tablets and cell phones, in different browsers, and at different screen resolutions with different colour, contrast and brightness adjustments. Ultimately there is no “standard”, since we can’t account for all the variations in the way your pages will look on the hundreds of computers that will view your site. We do our best to find a happy medium.
