[thelist] Removing link colors

Christian Heilmann lists at onlinetools.org
Sun Mar 27 05:46:45 CST 2005


Chris Kavanagh wrote:

> Good morning, Christian,
>
>> I would be  very interested to hear why making links blend into a 
>> text is good design and a good idea.
>> The argument that it is an intranet application and the  users will 
>> be trained is a feeble one at best. It is like saying "We publish 
>> this induction leaflet to each new joiner of the company. It is in 
>> cantonese, but Lee is very happy to help them to understand it".
>
>
> I would normally tend to agree with you - leverage existing user 
> knowledge and all that - but in this case I want to use colour to 
> convey a meaning.
>
> Here's a grab of my (work-in-progress) task management system, which 
> incidentally was supposed to have been finished more than eleven hours 
> ago:
> http://www.logorocks.com/heresy.tiff
>
> Inspired by the Mac version of Outlook (Entourage), the tasks are 
> colour coded as to which project they belong to.  They are clickable, 
> but the users will be trained to know that's the case, and I think 
> it's pretty obvious anyway.  What're your thoughts?
>
> I considered keeping the underlines for all the links, but it looked 
> so damn ugly.  I'm personally of the opinion that beauty enhances 
> usability and is worth striving for - it's so often ignored and 
> treated with disdain, which is I think short-sighted for a visual medium.

Ah, you could have mentioned that we are dealing with lists of links 
here. That is totally fine, just make sure the colours are easily 
distiguishable even to the colourblind (vischeck.com for simulators). I 
got the impression, and others seem to have, too, that you were talking 
about  links embedded in a text.  That would be very confusing.
 




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