pg63, The Elements of Typographic Style⁠ (third edition), Bringhurst⁠ 2004_21ya:

…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 dropcaps, 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_19ya ⁠Beautiful Evidence⁠, for example, uses red on practically every other page, and his ⁠2020 Seeing With Fresh Eyes appears to use even more. 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 HyperTIES⁠ hypertext system apparently found red links ⁠“easier to spot [but] user comprehension & recollection declined”⁠.) 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_14ya 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. But there may be some good reason for green being blocked, like ⁠being too energetic⁠ for biological cells to handle safely.

Curiously, although Apple did make heavy use of rubrication at some times, like its 1995_30ya 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 Hobbs2003, 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 Richardset al2003 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_28ya) 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_169ya, 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”, Borges1936⁠.

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 (there are also obscure unofficial ⁠variants⁠ involving South Korea or the 1936_89ya February 26 Incident⁠).

Hitler, in Mein Kampf, ⁠discusses the design of flags in detail, and notes of the Nazi flag:

And so, up to 1920_105ya, Marxism was actually confronted by no flag which philosophically would have represented its polar opposite. For even if the best parties of the German bourgeoisie after 1918_107ya would no longer consent to take over the suddenly discovered black, red, and gold flag as their own symbol, they themselves had no program of their own for the future to oppose to the new development; at best they had the idea of a reconstruction of the past Reich. And it is to this idea that black, white, and red banner of the old Reich owes its resurrection as the flag of our so-called national bourgeois parties…The present-day Reich, which sells itself and its citizens, must never be permitted to fly the black, white, and red flag of honor and heroes. As long as the November disgrace endures, let it bear its own outer covering and not try to steal this like everything else from a more honorable past. Let our bourgeois politicians remind their conscience that anyone who desires the black, white, and red flag for this state is burglarizing our past….The question of the new flag—that is, its appearance—occupied us intensely in those days…

…For this reason we had to reject all suggestions of identifying our movement through a white flag with the old state, or, more correctly, with those feeble parties whose sole political aim was the restoration of past conditions, as was proposed by many quarters. Besides, white is not a stirring color. It is suitable for chaste virgins’ clubs, but not for world-changing movements in a revolutionary epoch. Black was also suggested: in itself suitable for the present period, it contained nothing, however, that could in any way be interpreted as a picture of the will of our movement. Finally, this color has not a stirring enough effect either. White and blue were out of the question despite their wonderful esthetic effect, for these were the colors of an individual German state, and of an orientation toward particularistic narrow-mindedness which unfortunately did not enjoy the best reputation. Here, too, moreover, it would have been hard to find any reference to our movement. The same applied to black and white. Black, red, and gold were in themselves out of the question. So were black, white, and red, for reasons already mentioned, at least in their previous composition. In effect, to be sure, this color combination stands high above all others. It is the most brilliant harmony in existence.

…I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika. And this remained final.

…In midsummer of 1920_105ya the new flag came before the public for the first time. It was excellently suited to our new movement. It was young and new, like the movement itself. No one had seen it before; it had the effect of a burning torch. We ourselves experienced an almost childlike joy when a faithful woman party comrade for the first time executed the design and delivered the flag. Only a few months later we had half a dozen of them in Munich, and the monitor troop, which was growing bigger and bigger, especially contributed to spreading the new symbol of the movement. And a symbol it really is! Not only that the unique colors, which all of us so passionately love and which once won so much honor for the German people, attest our veneration for the past; they were also the best embodiment of the movement’s will. As National Socialists, we see our program in our flag. In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of the Aryan man, and, by the same token, the victory of the idea of creative work, which as such always has been and always will be anti-Semitic.

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”⁠, Keijzer2013, 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. The Bohr theory was unsuccessful; for background on the creation of this radium diagram, see Kragh2013.

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!

Tymms1860 includes many interesting color plates which use red starting on ⁠pg104⁠, but most I wouldn’t consider as examples of rubrication, specifically.