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Re: Too much red?

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From: Gareth Dart
Date: May 24, 2007 3:30AM


I'm afraid I can't cite any studies, but I can cite personal experience:
any large block of red (red on blue in particular, I find) seems to
'vibrate' to me, as your reviewer has already said.

I'm not alone: a very quick search on 'color vibration' did turn up
this:
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/accessibility/color.html#vibrate.

G

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Tim Beadle
Sent: Thursday 24 May 2007 09:11
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Too much red?

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