Do Darker colors on a website save energy?
• Dark “Low Wattage Palettes” have been touted as a greener option for energy efficient web design. Question is, do darker colors really use less energy? While old CRT monitors used to use more energy when displaying light colors, most of today’s flat screen LCD monitors use about the same or even more energy to display darker ones. So the future of energy efficient websites appears to be brighter rather than darker. Other considerations when picking a pallette of colors for your website include color blindness, usability, ink costs for printed web pages and basic asthetics. If darker colors are used, alternative CSS sheets to optimize printing efficiency are advisable so if someone simply must have a hard copy, they won´t waste all their ink and paper getting one. Fact is, writing a site using terse source code and fewer complex graphics and widgets and using green hosting services will net much more energy savings today.
