#ExcelPedroWave

Following one of the examples shown in the previous article Color's chart, it is very easy to create the Flag of Spain in Excel, how difficult is to choose a good color palette, because it is officially allowed a range for red and yellow flag colors.

30 years ago the Spanish Constitution was unaware of the Internet, created in the last 20 years, long remained a communication system used exclusively by the military of the U.S. Department of Defense - DoD, the CERN laboratory and universities. The web as we know it is used worldwide from April 30, 1993.

The first Web surfers had limited resources with the first browsers, which is resented in its design and aesthetics. With the new user-friendly browsers, not only for the military or research fields, the green "phosphors" text of old CRT, or white on black background, became full of the colors and interactivity of current web.

Above you can see running an embedded image in animated GIF format that can have an idea of the possibilities that allow user-centered design with today's media.

The following video show how to make in 2 minutes the flag of Spain in Excel:





The most important thing is to convert the 4 series into equal 3 horizontal stripes, giving format to the data series, selecting into Series option, the width range to 0% (no interval).

The color's issue is another story. Due to the tolerance of 5 CIELAB units, as permitted by the Spanish authorities, the choice of colors is having complications. According to the Wikipedia article on the Flag of Spain, its colors with CIE (Illuminant C) in HTML are:

Color	Color Name	Y	x	y	HTML	RGB
Yellow	Flag Weld-Yellow	56.7	0.488	0.469	#F1BF00	241/191/0
Red	Flag Red	9.5	0.614	0.320	#AA151B	170/21/27

But the color palette should be as follows, see the technical specifications with a tolerance of 5 CIELAB units:

Color	Color Name	Tone H en º	Croma C	Lightness L	HTML Range	RGB Range
Yellow	Flag Weld-Yellow	85.0	95.0	80.0	#F0AD00 - #FFC900	240/173/0 - 255/201/0
Red	Flag Red	35.0	70.0	37.0	#A00011 - #C02226	160/0/17 - 192/34/38

As I said, a color conversion program, such as The Coloring Pages, will help us to transform their values in different metrics. Below is the conversion of CIE values (Illuminant C) to RGB for red and yellow colors:

Therefore, next HTML and RGB values would be appropriate:

Color	Color name	Y	x	y	HTML	RGB
Yellow	Flag Weld-Yellow	56.7	0.488	0.469	#FFB300	255/179/0
Red	Flag Red	9.5	0.614	0.320	#A80C1B	168/12/27

Graphic designers and user-centered design application developers should not stop doing our work when it comes to something as important as choosing the right color palette for a corporate graphic image or any other type and we must always ensure that we are following the original technical specifications of the projects we are up to make.

Do you know the flags' colors of your country?