Colors Can Be a Dangerous Thing
This morning I was just checking over a few Google Docs where I'd made some comments for the author, and wanted to see if there was still a reason to keep the doc(s) open to make it easy to respond to the notes, or resolve them for the author. And I noticed that the author had chosen to use an odd color for the word Draft in the header - Goldenrod. Now I'm not a style snob... but that struck me as an odd color for something that you might want to draw attention to. I mean, the text is black on white, and then there's the obvious red for alarm, and green for good... but what about the non-obvious Draft?
And then it got me thinking about the other really unusual uses of color I've seen at The Shop on documents -- and I"m not talking about spreadsheets - I think those are universally accepted as examples of hideous color combinations... No, these are documents that have had background colors... foreground colors... just amazing combinations, that seem to have no sense as to why they are colored this way.
And it isn't something that I have to correct - it's just something that makes me giggle, and I need to put a face with the color choices, and it's usually someone that is not what I'd call a Creative Professional. It's understandable - they want things to stick out - but with so many things that need to stick out, they have to use colors to classify them. It's just like the line from The Incredibles:
Then when everyone is super, no one will be.
- Syndrome
But that doesn't stop some folks from making the most creative color pairings I think I've seen. It's just something I find funny about people... we're all different, and we all bring our own background to everything we do. 🙂