The Logo Color

[eddie595]

Quick question, do you use 'fefffc' as the background color for your xkcd main logo because it is closer to the color of paper? Just curious...

[Socal Swimmer]

Quick question, do you use 'fefffc' as the background color for your xkcd main logo because it is closer to the color of paper? Just curious...

could it just be some of the black bleeding onto the white due to anti-aliasing at small sizes?

[eddie595]

Don't believe so, unless it would effect the entire background color of the image.?

[Socal Swimmer]

Don't believe so, unless it would effect the entire background color of the image.?

could you link to teh exact image? I'm not sure which one you are talking about ...

[ethraax]

Quick question: Who are you actually trying to ask here? The creator of the logo? Because you're likely not to get a response from him here.

[Piquan]

Sorry to necro the thread, but I'd like to add a note for anybody researching this in the future.

Your browser is displaying the logo correctly; no anti-aliasing, decompression artifacts, colorspace or gamma correction problems, or anything like that. The correct color of the background, based on a dump of the logo using "pngcheck -vvvv 9be30a7.png", is rgb(254,255,252), or #fefffc. The file does not specify a colorspace or gamma; the PNG spec suggests that in this case, it should be assumed to be in the device colorspace, and the application should guess at the gamma. So yeah, the file really does specify a slightly off-white background. (It surprises me that the brightest channel is green; it really looks more pinkish to me.)

This analysis is based on the logo as of this writing, http://imgs.xkcd.com/s/9be30a7.png, which has an MD5 of d3cc3410a659cd2c847464125553a4fd. This has been the logo since July 2006 (although it had a different filename until August 2010).

I have no idea why he made the background off-white. I'm guessing it's to snipe colorimetry nerds into spending over an hour trying to track down which step of their color-matching process is broken. Sigh, mark another victim.