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Too much red?

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From: Tim Beadle
Date: May 24, 2007 2:20AM

Hi,

I'm currently working on a site that the designers have (rather
naively in my view) translated the print brand colour of 100% Yellow,
100% Magenta into rgb #f00.

This wouldn't be so bad as small design accents, but the site calls
for large blocks of colour in the page header and section headings. On
my screen, I'm finding that the large swathes of red make for
uncomfortable page viewing; another person spoke of the colour
"vibrating" when she looked at it. Others, when viewing the site for
the first time have expressed negative reactions to the colour.

The site was designed on a Mac, but I'm using a PC; I'm aware of the
differing colour temperature and gamma between the two platforms. Most
of our site audience use PCs.

Can anyone point to any studies or guidelines that definitively state
that using large blocks of #f00 is a bad idea?

Best regards,

Tim