When we were developing our site map we thought it would be good to use a group of pale background colours, one for each area of the site. So we searched for a web page with examples of pale colours. Not finding any, we created this set of colours. Then we thought "maybe other people could use this too."
So here are 64 pale colours that you can use as background for web pages, using a 4096-colour (12-bit) palette. Though these go beyond the 216 "websafe" colours, they all look OK on monitors that perceive only 256 colours, by reverting to the nearest web-safe colour. Our log files show that over 97% of our visitors will see all 64 colours as different.
Each colour swatch shows its code in CSS style. For example, the top right cell, labelled cff, shows the colour referred to in HTML as #CCFFFF.
If you'd like a nicely matching set of 4 background colours, you could do worse than choosing one column from this table.
| ccc | ccd | cce | ccf | cdc | cdd | cde | cdf | cec | ced | cee | cef | cfc | cfd | cfe | cff |
| dcc | dcd | dce | dcf | ddc | ddd | dde | ddf | dec | ded | dee | def | dfc | dfd | dfe | dff |
| ecc | ecd | ece | ecf | edc | edd | ede | edf | eec | eed | eee | eef | efc | efd | efe | eff |
| fcc | fcd | fce | fcf | fdc | fdd | fde | fdf | fec | fed | fee | fef | ffc | ffd | ffe | fff |
See also our pages of websafe colours and named colours.