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.↩︎