On (not) seeing red

4 May 2008, 4pm

Say, did you know that people who design web sites who write on their own sites about the changes they’ve recently made to their site design have no idea whatsoever that you couldn’t give a flying roll of monkey doughnuts? Bless their little cotton socks.

Moving on: apologies to the 7–10% of you so rudely disrespected since the relaunch of this here site. In one of those regrettably too-clever-by-half design decisions, influenced by the hardcore tradesman’s printing shop belief (which indeed goes way back to scribal rubrication) that the universes of thought conveyed through text need never arrive in any colour but black, or sometimes red, I had chosen to differentiate hyperlinks within text with that sometimes colour.

It’s always good design practice when indicating differing kinds of text to change one parameter at a time: what patent disrespect to both writer and reader to go too far, as many designers do, and interrupt the simple process of reading to pile on multiple indicators (weight, decoration, size, colour, background colour, popups, whatever) just to flag that some text is clickable (imagine driving along a smoothly paved road, then being on a block with an Olive Garden on it, information conveyed not only by the Olive Garden sign but by the road suddenly being paved with thin red sauce and shitty cheese).

Hover over a link for a before-and-after.

My one parameter shift, however, didn’t take into account the sizeable percentage of people unable to easily differentiate red from black, effectively rendering the parameter change to zero. Any designer who ignores this sort of accessibility issue must go to bed without dessert.

Much as I prefer the red from a text design perspective, these chalky underlines will have to do until some night next week when I’ll no doubt wake up remembering underlines cause shingles in badgers or some such.

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