Save Your Watts With Emergy-C
by Mark Ontkush, Boston, Massachusetts, USA 
on 04. 2.07
Many electronic devices, such as cathode ray tubes, plasma screens, and OLEDs consume more energy when displaying certain colors. These devices use the three primary colors of light - red, green, and blue - and turn them on at varying intensities to produce a particular color. As a result, colors such as white which use all three primary colors turned on at full intensity cost a lot of money (and energy) to display. In the electronic world, white is expensive.
A fellow by the name of Jon Doucette took this idea and created a low wattage web palette that, according to article, only uses three or four watts more than a completely black screen. Starting with the EnergyStar wattage ratings, he came up with six colors that work well together. White is included in the palette but is it supposed to be used as an accent color. The savings do not apply to devices that have a constant backlight, such as LCD monitors, but it's a neat idea that is especially practical for handheld device and large web sites. Save your watts!
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Maybe Blueprints will make a comeback?
Does this mean TreeHugger is going to redesign its website?
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editor note: We'll certainly consider it for the next redesign.
At the same time I can turn down the backlight (brightness) of my LCD when I'm reading a white page with black text. Especially when there is a lot of ambient light. It seems to save the battery more than viewing a black page with white text.
Has anyone actually listed the hex code for these energy saving colors, so that folks can use them in their own web site designs?
Hi Turil,
I included them at the site, thanks!
mark
this is only going to be useful for plasmas.
This would be completely useless on LCD.
who is browsing the web on a regular basis on there plasma screen?
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editor note: Many (tens? hundreds?) millions of people around the world are using CRTs.
Anything other than black text on a very light background is very hard to read online. And printing out such pages would waste a lot of ink.
Interesting in theory. In practice it's ridiculous and I'm sad to see so many reactionarry wagon-jumpers. Is it worth a few watts to sacrifice human experience (readability)? In practice it would cost the average monitor MORE wattage because they are going to eschew your site to settle on others using reasonable whitespace.
A better method would be a call to users to set their desktops to low-wattage colors and remind them to minimize windows they aren't using.
I love this, simply because it's just good to know. Doesn't mean we all have to jump on this wagon, but simply knowing about these colors might enable some forward-thinking pallettes in the future. Definitely worth noting, thanks!
Hi there-
I've designed a google custom search (no ads) using Emergy-C for results - the page is here:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?cx=006697985863738578574%3Ay8ur1tvshoc
Only the results comes up in the Emergy-C palette, due to the way Google works, but you could design your own search engine front page which uses the Emergy-C palette, using the following code:
http://www.google.com/coop/manage/cse/code?cx=006697985863738578574:y8ur1tvshoc
Thanks,
and good luck-
M@t
Sorry, this comment engine may cut the ends of the links - just in case it does, here's the same links in a multi-line
Search engine:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse?
cx=006697985863738578574%3
Ay8ur1tvshoc
Google Search input box:
http://www.google.com/coop/manage/
cse/code?cx=006697985863738578574:
y8ur1tvshoc