Blue On Red is the New Black Matt 11 Mar 2005

43 comments Latest by GO77

New York Magazine's Best Of pages feature this headache-inducing link/background color combo (after the jump).

Blue on Red

Maybe it's one of those optical illusion thingies where you stare at it for 30 seconds and then look at a wall and you can see the Mona Lisa or something.

43 comments (comments are closed)

Dan Boland 11 Mar 05

You know, you could have just left it at the link… ;D

Seriously, some people just shouldn’t be allowed to touch this stuff. I mean, who at that site signed off on this holy terror?

Which plays into something I see a lot on the web, links that are hard to read. I don’t understand it, even some of the Zen Garden designs have links that require a little squinting. It doesn’t require rocket science to make something readable.

Simon Jessey 11 Mar 05

In Windows versions of IE6, Opera, and Firefox, the hyperlinks are white. I suspect you are viewing the page on a Mac, am I right?

Bryan 11 Mar 05

Damn, I about threw up when I saw that.

I think I am forming a headache too.

One of several Steves 11 Mar 05

Not on my Windows box, Simon. Blue on red.

John Zeratsky 11 Mar 05

The Mona Lisa would be better than what I’m seeing now… spots. Ouch.

John Peele 11 Mar 05

Matt… Pleeeeeease take it down. It hurts, it burns, it is bad.

Bruno Figueiredo 11 Mar 05

No wonder, the CSS is a mess. Actually, in FF 1.01 I see it white but there’s a parent-child conflict in the styling of tables that causes this problem. Still, that’s an awful color scheme. As bad as green on red.

Mark 11 Mar 05

Actually, it’s white links on red on my Windows box, as well.

Steve, via Den, Fla and now RDU 11 Mar 05

Yeah, it’s white links on a red bg. Looks ok. Firefox 1.0.1/XP Pro.

Adam Michela 11 Mar 05

Yeah, its Red on White here.

Like Bruno said though, look at the CSS. It’s a mess.

One of several Steves 11 Mar 05

OK, I’m an idiot. Yeah, white on red when I go to the New York page. For some reason, I thought the comment was about the example posted here at SvN. Duh, it’s a screen grab.

Allen 11 Mar 05

you should see the hover… its red… but not the same red… so you see just a tiny little bit of the link… ugggghhh-ly

MJ 11 Mar 05

Genious! The guy who made this! You should hire them :-)

MO 11 Mar 05

Um.. The links are white now.

Benjy 11 Mar 05

I’m seeing white on red. Windows XP/IE6

John Zeratsky 11 Mar 05

The links are blue on Mac, white on Windows.

Jason Beaird 11 Mar 05

What a mess…they’re loading their stylesheet dynamically via javascript and then there’s a noscript block on the page that loads the same stylesheet for browsers that don’t have javascript enabled. Regardless though, the white links show up in Firefox, Opera, IE6, IE5.5, and Netscape 4.7 for PC. I would try it out on the browsers on my mac at home but I’m having problems remoting in…and I’m guessing I still won’t see blue on red. Looks like somebody there is either a fan of 37signals or checked their referrer logs.

Jason Beaird 11 Mar 05

Well…after reading John’s comment, maybe they just don’t like mac users.

Jordan T. Cox 11 Mar 05

The university system I attend has a lot of web-based curriculum and content from the professors, and for some odd reason they all believe that amazingly horrible and painful colors match - and should be used religiously. When I use anything designed by an educator here, I feel as though it was designed by a toddler or something. We recently switched to a new course management system, that thankfully does not allow educators to modify the colors presented. Why do some people think things like bright blue on bright red go together? My mind boggles.

John Zeratsky 11 Mar 05

Ahh, yes. “Professor design.” My favorite is the yellow-on-blue Powerpoints that most profs insist on using.

seth 11 Mar 05

yeah who uses a mac anyway? :) red/white here…but i think i know what they were trying to accomplish…

get out your old 3d glasses and look at the page…a special message appears!

Adam Michela 11 Mar 05

I was at a training course the past two days…

All of the slides in the presentation had a Red to Black gradient background, the text was Yellow and Blue.

Gotta love corporate america.

Adam Michela 11 Mar 05

I’m curious…

Does this happen in FF on the Mac?

chrispian 11 Mar 05

Who do I complain to about the seizure I just had. Warn somebody before you post a picture like that. My eyes are burning! FIRE!

Jordan T. Cox 11 Mar 05

Yup, it’s blue on red in FF on Mac here. I don’t have time to examine the code, but yae! I wonder if this was the intended effect. :)

PeterDrife 11 Mar 05

I think this may have been a bad time for this post. It’s kind of hard to enjoy the “design in progress” with that atrocious list of links staring back at you.

Jonathan Fenocchi 11 Mar 05

I don’t see the Mona Lisa, but it fades in and out of focus. Man, I have to take out my contacts for a few minutes now… I’m swimming.

Dave Ferrick 11 Mar 05

This would serve as a fantastic segue into a contingency deisgn discussion.

Adam Codega 12 Mar 05

FF on Windows XP and it’s white and red. Looks like a code snafu.

Jordan T. Cox 12 Mar 05

Just confirming; over here in Linux land FF also displays blue on red. FF for Windows must have something weird going on with it… strange that all platforms behavethe same, except windows. ;p

A. T 12 Mar 05

Over here in (another?) Linux land FF(1.0.1) shows white on red..

Adam Michela 12 Mar 05

So ignoring that fact that their code sucks… have we found a FF bug?

Shouldn’t FF behave identically across platforms?

Laura 13 Mar 05

It made me cry.

Jordan T. Cox 13 Mar 05

Regarding FF differences; it should be noted that I am using the latest nightly. Perhaps it is not a platform issue; but a release version issue?

A. T 13 Mar 05

Well, the latest nightly I could find (didn’t compile it myself) displays the page correctly. (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.6) Gecko/20050310 Firefox/1.0.1)

JonB 14 Mar 05

To a much lesser extent, this is the same effect that the new design of SvN had on me - the colour getting in the way of reading the content.

I notice the green has been de-saturated a bit now… that’s better :)

JonB 14 Mar 05

Thankfully, Bright Green is not the New Black on SvN ;)

Adam Micheal 14 Mar 05

Jordan, could be. I’m on 1.01.