pg63, The El­e­ments of Ty­po­graphic Style (third edi­tion), Bringhurst 2004:

…if the text, or a new sec­tion of text, be­gins at the top of a page with no head­ing to mark it, a lit­tle fan­fare will prob­a­bly be re­quired. The same is true if the open­ing page is busy. If there is a chap­ter ti­tle, an epigraph, a side­note, and a pho­to­graph and cap­tion, the open­ing of the text will need a ban­ner, a ten-gal­lon hat or a bright red dress to draw the eye.

Fleu­rons (ty­po­graphic or­na­ments) are often used to flag text open­ings, and are often printed in red, the ty­pog­ra­pher’s ha­bit­ual sec­ond col­or. The open­ing phrase, or en­tire first line, can also be set in small caps or in bold u&lc. An­other ex­cel­lent method of mark­ing the start of the text, in­her­ited from an­cient scribal prac­tice, is a large ini­tial cap­i­tal: a ver­sal or let­trine. Ver­sals can be treated in many ways. In­dented or cen­tered, they can stick up from the text. Flush left, they can be nested into the text (ty­pog­ra­phers call these drop caps, as op­posed to el­e­vated or stick­-up cap­s). If there is room, they can hang in the left mar­gin. They can be set in the same face as the text or in some­thing out­landishly differ­ent. In scribal and ty­po­graphic tra­di­tion alike, where the bud­get per­mits, ver­sals too are gen­er­ally red or an­other color in pref­er­ence to black.

When us­ing white-on-black, what is the func­tional equiv­a­lent of red? A green? A blue? For all the tra­di­tional pop­u­lar­ity among pro­gram­mers of the clas­sic mono­chrome mon­i­tor com­puter ter­mi­nal green-on-black phos­phor color scheme ex­em­pli­fied by the VT100—what I my­self use—­most dark mode de­signs I see cur­rently seem to opt for a blue…↩︎

Tufte rou­tinely uses rubri­ca­tion in his graphs & sparklines to em­pha­size key num­bers or points: his 2006 Beau­ti­ful Ev­i­dence, for ex­am­ple, uses red on prac­ti­cally every other page. The use of pro­pri­etary Be­mbo fonts and rubri­ca­tion mean that even Tufte ads are rec­og­niz­ably by Tufte. (This does pose some chal­lenges for the fam­ily of Tufte CSS pack­ages for var­i­ous for­mats: there are now open-source Be­mbo fonts, but do red links re­ally work on­line? Some Tufte CSS im­ple­men­ta­tions like Eric J. Wang’s go for it, and oth­ers do not.) The sheer num­ber of Tufte uses makes it diffi­cult to se­lect any ex­am­ples for this gallery.↩︎

Byrne’s edi­tion is beau­ti­ful and un­usual enough that there are at least two at­tempts at recre­at­ing it worth look­ing at: Slyusarev Sergey’s “Fancy Eu­clid’s El­e­ments in T_eX” for PDFs; and Nicholas Rougeux’s “Mak­ing of Byrne’s Eu­clid” on how he cre­ated a beau­ti­ful in­ter­ac­tive HTML ver­sion.↩︎

Is say­ing that rubri­ca­tion works be­cause it ‘max­i­mizes con­trast’ ques­tion-beg­ging?↩︎

Use of pri­mary col­ors like Byrne (yel­low/red/blue) high­lights an ad­di­tional ad­van­tage of rubri­ca­tion for em­pha­sis: it avoids prob­lems with the most com­mon forms of color blind­ness—pretty much every­one can see red or at least see the con­trast with red.↩︎

While ex­cep­tions have been found to this flow­chart and the Berlin & Kay re­sults ques­tioned, the red re­sults (that it fol­lows black­/white dark­ness terms, and pre­cedes all other col­ors, and red is con­sis­tently red cross-cul­ture) ap­pear to be sup­ported by the sub­se­quent da­ta.↩︎

“Why Red Means Red in Al­most Every Lan­guage: The con­found­ing con­sis­tency of color cat­e­gories”, Nau­tilus:

It’s un­clear, though, why our in­fant brains chunk col­ors at all. In a 2011 study, a team led by re­searchers at Mount Sinai School of Med­i­cine, in New York, found a math­e­mat­i­cal for­mula that de­scribes how in­puts from the retina could re­sult in the sep­a­ra­tion of col­ors into warm (white) and cool (black) tones, sug­gest­ing that the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of our vi­sion sys­tem may cre­ate nat­ural “fault lines” in color space.¹⁰ Other re­searchers spec­u­late that col­ors in our en­vi­ron­ments may clus­ter around cer­tain shades, such as the bright red of blood and berries, or the solid green of fields and fo­liage. As ba­bies, we may be primed to pick up on these sta­tis­ti­cal reg­u­lar­i­ties.

Given how waste­ful that seems, one might won­der about al­ter­na­tives; there might have been ear­lier ones, lead­ing to the Pur­ple Earth hy­poth­e­sis. Are there bet­ter chloro­phylls which could ab­sorb more light? Pos­si­bly, the bac­te­ri­ochloro­phyll ab­sorb light that plants can­not, and are one of many sug­gested ways to im­prove pho­to­syn­the­sis effi­ciency.↩︎

Cu­ri­ous­ly, al­though Ap­ple did make heavy use of rubri­ca­tion at some times, like its 1995 Ap­ple Mac­in­tosh Per­forma 600 Se­ries User Man­u­al, post-1997 Ap­ple ap­pears de­void of that tech­nique. Did Steve Jobs not like red?↩︎

This is likely from Mark Lom­bardi: Global Net­works, ed Hobbs 2003, which demon­strates rubri­ca­tion on its cov­er, and in an homage to the artist, uses rubri­ca­tion in the ac­com­pa­ny­ing tex­tual bi­og­ra­phy/dis­cus­sion of Lom­bardi; it also uses side­notes. Lom­bardi, in­ci­den­tal­ly, read Tufte’s En­vi­sion­ing In­for­ma­tion, and Richards et al 2003 spec­u­lates he was in­flu­enced by the Uboku Nishi­tani cal­lig­ra­phy ex­am­ple (also re­pro­duced on this page)—per­son­al­ly, I sus­pect the type­writer & other rubri­cated di­a­grams were more in­flu­en­tial. His use of yel­low back­grounds is also Tufte-like.↩︎

The TikZ com­mu­nity uses rubri­ca­tion heav­i­ly, as can be seen in the TikZ ex­am­ple gallery. Ex­am­ples which use red:

• “Ma­trix mul­ti­pli­ca­tion”
• “Sym­me­tries of the plane”
• “Tkz-lin­kn­odes ex­am­ples”
• “The tkz-2d pack­age”
• “Split­ting of Hy­dro­gen in differ­ent strong mag­netic fields”
• “Seis­mic fo­cal mech­a­nism in 3D view”
• “Scheme of Great­est Com­mon Di­vi­sor (GCD)”
• “SWAN wave model”
• “Prin­ci­ple of X-ray pho­to­elec­tron spec­troscopy (XPS)”
• “Pha­sor di­a­gram”
• “Fold­able do­dec­a­he­dron with Cal­en­dar”/“Birth­day cal­en­dar”
• “Draw­ing lat­tice points and vec­tors”
• “Block Di­a­gram for TTL IC Mul­ti­plexer 74HC153”
• chem­fig
• sim­ple ex­am­ples: “Rain­bows—­Sun ray en­ter­ing a rain drop”/“The 3d­plot pack­age”/“GNUPLOT ba­sics”/“An­no­tated ma­nip­u­la­tor”/“An­dler op­ti­mal lot-size”/“Po­lar­iza­tion state of light”

An­other com­put­er-gen­er­ated work, Liza Da­ly’s Ser­aphs Voyn­ich Man­u­script par­o­dy, makes el­e­gant use of a faded red font on sepia back­ground with (usu­al­ly) black il­lus­tra­tions, but be­cause it uses it for all text rather than em­pha­sis, I ex­clude it.↩︎

Tufte notes (pg142, Vi­sual Ex­pla­na­tions 1997) that Youman­s’s di­a­grams are “ac­com­pa­nied by a hes­i­tant and apolo­getic text that car­ries on about the pos­si­bil­ity of un­duly lit­eral read­ings, as if di­a­grams are chron­i­cally threat­ened by mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tions”. How­ev­er, Youman­s’s text­book was aimed at school­child­ren, and ap­pears to have been some­thing of an in­no­va­tion: he de­fends his “novel” “sys­tem of il­lus­trat­ing Chem­istry” in his pref­ace “To Stu­dents and Teach­ers”, and takes pains to in­clude 2 pages of “Opin­ions of Dis­tin­guished Chemists and Ed­u­ca­tors”, tes­ti­mo­ni­als that his “new Chem­i­cal Di­a­grams” are clear, cor­rect, and con­ducive to chil­drens’ chem­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion. When we con­sider the con­tem­po­rary hos­til­ity of many ed­u­ca­tors to any kind of ac­cel­er­a­tion like SMPY or to­wards ‘young adult lit­er­a­ture’, which might strain or dam­age frag­ile young minds, and re­flect on how much greater such hos­til­ity may’ve been in 1856, we can­not fault Youmans for at­tempt­ing to pre­empt such crit­i­cism.↩︎

For a good dis­cus­sion of the var­i­ous trans­la­tions’ virtues & vices and what Bur­ton was try­ing to achieve, see “The Trans­la­tors of The One Thou­sand and One Nights”, Borges 1936.↩︎

Like most tech­nolo­gies, rubri­ca­tion can be used for evil (Naz­i/­Com­mu­nist pro­pa­gan­da) as well as for good… Speak­ing of fa­mous flags, why not The Red Cross? Be­cause the Red Cross or­ga­ni­za­tions’ em­blem is based on fig­ure-ground in­ver­sions of the flag of Switzer­land, which uses only red/white, with no black ever em­ployed, and this in­ver­sion ap­proach has car­ried through to its al­ter­na­tives like the Red Cres­cent sym­bol.

Sim­i­larly for the Japan­ese Ris­ing Sun Flag or cur­rent flag of Japan—there do not ap­pear to be any no­table offi­cial flags em­ploy­ing black, aside from, un­sur­pris­ing­ly, the em­peror mourn­ing pro­to­col (a­side from vari­ants in­volv­ing South Ko­rea or the 1936 Feb­ru­ary 26 In­ci­dent).↩︎

Nazi art & ty­pog­ra­phy are as­so­ci­ated with both black­let­ter & also with Paul Ren­ner’s sans Fu­tura. This is be­cause the Nazis them­selves were di­vided about what to use, al­though the “An­ti­qua–Frak­tur dis­pute” ul­ti­mately came down on the side of more con­ven­tional Lat­in/Ro­man scripts & the Nazis banned black­let­ter from gov­ern­ment use.↩︎

I was amused to dis­cover Fab­re’s cover while skim­ming Pub­lic Do­main Re­view es­says, as the name Fabre rang a bel­l—not long be­fore, I had read “The Sphex sto­ry: How the cog­ni­tive sci­ences kept re­peat­ing an old and ques­tion­able anec­dote”, Kei­jzer 2013, crit­i­ciz­ing the Sphex anec­dote which Hof­s­tadter & Den­nett so en­joy. And imag­ine what phrase I ran into within the first screens of read­ing Fab­re’s cat es­say, but “red-let­ter day”! The Baader-Mein­hof effect‽↩︎

1923 trans­la­tion of Bohrs Atom­te­ori, al-men­fat­teligt frem­stil­let by Lind­say & Lind­say, color plates ap­par­ently in orig­i­nal; note that sev­eral of the scan­s/e-books are in­com­plete & omit di­a­grams.↩︎

Iso­type made heavy use of red as its de­fault sec­ond col­or; see pg41–50, where the jus­ti­fi­ca­tion is pri­mar­ily that many print­ers may only do black & red. In­ci­den­tal­ly, I use the WP photo here in­stead of the on­line scans be­cause they are low-res­o­lu­tion and the orig­i­nal copies may have been fad­ed, so they do not con­vey the sharp­ness of the print­ing & the bright­ness of the red ink.↩︎

MS 35254 also offers some ex­tra­or­di­nar­ily elab­o­rate his­to­ri­ated ini­tials—so much so I did­n’t re­al­ize un­til read­ing the cap­tions!↩︎

Tymms 1860 in­cludes many in­ter­est­ing color plates which use red start­ing on pg104, but most I would­n’t con­sider as ex­am­ples of rubri­ca­tion, specifi­cal­ly.↩︎