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 TeX” 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.↩︎

Another computer-generated work, Liza Daly’s Seraphs Voynich Manuscript parody, makes elegant use of a red font on sepia background, but because it uses it for all text, I exclude it.↩︎

For a good discussion of the various translations, see Borges.↩︎

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‽↩︎

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 rubrication examples here.↩︎