Rubrication Design Examples
A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic pattern of using red versus black for emphasis.
Dating back to medieval manuscripts, text has often been highlighted using a particular distinct bright red. The contrast of black and red on a white background is highly visible and striking, and this has been reused many times, in a way which I have not noticed for other colors. I call these uses rubrication and collate examples I have noticed from many time periods. This design pattern does not seem to have a widely-accepted name or be commonly discussed, so I propose extending the term “rubrication” to all instances of this pattern, not merely religious texts.
Why this rubrication design pattern? Why red, specifically, and not, say, orange or purple? Is it just a historical accident? Cross-cultural research suggests that for humans, red may be intrinsically more noticeable & has a higher contrast with black, explaining its perennial appeal as a design pattern.
Regardless, it is a beautiful design pattern which has been used in many interesting ways over the millennia, and perhaps may inspire the reader.
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Red is among the most arresting and classiest of colors, as a glance through fine book editions reveals. What is snazzier than a good dropcap which has been “rubricated” (sometimes called “printer’s red”)? And yes, rubrication is usually red—hardly ever orange, or green, or purple, or any of the other possible choices.
Rubrication is not merely coloring everything red, but a careful use of some red against mostly black in order to emphasize important elements. We have red letter days for holidays, Christians will subconsciously associate red text with the words of Jesus Christ in typesetting the New Testament (critical annotations in red being an ancient tradition), some editions of the Qur’an put Arabic diacritics in red; maps or charts may highlight key destinations in red while every other location is printed in black; losses in finance are traditionally printed in red; emphasis in business typewriting were done with red ink if available; and corrections to written material are traditionally in red ink.
Further, I noticed that these all seem to use not just red, but almost the same shade of red: a certain bright but medium red, never another shade like a pink or a deep scarlet. That might be an artifact of traditionally using iron gall ink (eventually upgrading to “minium” lead pigments) and then everyone imitating it, but once I began paying attention to red/black combinations, like the famous “law of fives”, I began noticing it everywhere—as Bringhurst remarks, red is “the typographer’s habitual second color”.1 Indeed, the use of red seems to have become quite common on the Internet these days. (One place I haven’t seen rubrication used well is in predominantly black settings, such as the increasingly popular “dark mode”.2)
Why Red?
This [red bicycle] is three times faster than the usual bicycle!
I could imagine that being true in medieval times when rubrication started (iron gall-based rust/oxide pigments are surely extremely cheap compared to many things), but that seems like it should have stopped being a problem at least by the 1800s when synthetic dyes & inks were invented. It also wouldn’t explain the prestige of vermilion not merely as a red in general, but as a vermilion ink reserved for imperial use in calligraphy & documents in both the Byzantine & Chinese empires.
Edward Tufte, who highlights many examples like Florence Nightingale in his data visualization books and is a skillful user of rubrication himself3, notes in Envisioning Information 199034ya (chapter 5, “Color and Information”, pg83–86), apropos of Byrne’s unique color-diagram book interpretation of Euclid’s Elements4:
Byrne’s colors keep in mind the knowledge to be communicated, color for information. Use of the primary colors and black provides maximum differentiation (no four colors differ more).5 This yellow, broken with orange, is darkened in value, sharpening the definition of its edge against white paper; and the blue is relatively light (on a value scale of blues), reinforcing its distance from black. In the diagrams, the least-used color is black, and it is carefully avoided for large, solid elements—adding to the overall coherence of the proofs by muting unnecessary contrasts.6
One possible answer comes from anthropology, investigating cross-cultural perceptions of colors. Berlin & Kay found, as summarized by Wikipedia7:
…in languages with fewer than the maximum eleven color categories, the colors followed a specific evolutionary pattern. This pattern is as follows:
All languages contain terms for black and white.
If a language contains 3 terms, then it contains a term for red.
If a language contains 4 terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
If a language contains 5 terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
If a language contains 6 terms, then it contains a term for blue.
If a language contains 7 terms, then it contains a term for brown.
If a language contains 8 or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange or gray.
In addition to following this evolutionary pattern absolutely, each of the languages studied also selected virtually identical focal hues for each color category present. For example, the term for “red” in each of the languages corresponded to roughly the same shade in the Munsell color system. Consequently, they posited that the cognition, or perception, of each color category is also universal.4
Are there deep evolutionary reasons for red being so important to human color vision, perhaps because red is overrepresented in nature in important things like blood or berries (1976)?8 I have to wonder why a color like green is not more psychologically important, though, as green is surely even more common than berries (which often aren’t red)—thanks to the inefficiency of chlorophyll in absorbing those particular wavelengths of visible light from our sun9—and human eyes are in fact physically most sensitive to green light in night vision. Why aren’t humans most attuned to green, the better to navigate jungles etc? (Is Rayleigh scattering involved somehow?) So this is a little puzzling.
Examples
Many years ago—but not that many!—one of our printing & typesetting instructors said with great gravitas that “there are only two colors: red and black.”
MyFonts, 2020-03-8
Below is a gallery of rubrication typographic or diagrammatic examples, which I’ve selected for their appearance or subject; they sorted in reverse chronological order, from roughly post-WWII, post-Renaissance, and Renaissance/medieval.
Contemporary
“Red has to be in every poster.”
Stedelijk poster principles #2, Willem Sandberg (cf. Isotype)
Digital
Non-screenshotable:
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Randomly-selected dropcaps and pointing hands in Emily Short’s 2015 computer-generated fantasy travel guide, The Annals of the Parrigues, are rubricated.13
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The 2019 redesign of The Atlantic introduced a rubricated initial A as the favicon.
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Trends: rubrication of a sorts seems to have become a media web design trend, perhaps ~2021—by 2023, I had begun noticing a single small bright red button (or blue, then a miscellany of colors depending on website design) on most media websites for their various kinds of subscription/donation/newsletter/sharing spam, and had to begin creating adblock rules just for them.
Their annoying intrusiveness is a testimony to the effectiveness of rubrication.
Modern
Medieval
As expensive and restricted as materials were, and labor-intensive the process of manuscript copying, medieval and later scribes nevertheless accomplished great things, including effective use of rubrication, dropcaps, and diagrams (some of which put most contemporary web designers to shame):
External Links
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“Calligraphy Letterform Album” (Johann Hering’s Kalligraphische Schriftvorlagen)
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“Red, Black, White: Only drawings with red and black pens on white paper”/“Rubrication”, Daniel Friedman (art gallery)
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“Filling in the Blanks: A Prehistory of the Adult Coloring Craze”, 2019
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“Red Ones Go Faster”, TVTropes
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“Pixels and their neighbors: Finite volume”, et al 2016 (color-coding equations)
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“The First Roman Fonts”, John Boardley
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“A Pocket Cathedral”, Jaap Harskamp
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“Type Matters: A Review”, James Puckett
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“Eat more cottage cheese: you’ll need less meat”, WWI food poster; Chicken poster (Smithsonian)
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“Walbaum Type Specimen in high resolution” (on Justus Erich Walbaum’s Didone font)
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“Reem Kufi Ink” (color Google Fonts)
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Shall We Slay To Eat?, Kellogg 1899125ya (early vegetarian shock tactics)
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Alfred Tennyson’s May Queen rubricated & illuminated by Alberto Sangorski
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“Meander is a procedural system for generating historical maps of rivers that never existed”, Robert Hodgin (based on “Ancient Courses: Harold Fisk’s Meander Maps of the Mississippi River (194480ya)”)
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“What Could Be Better? Pairing and Comparing the Scheide and Kane Copies of Fifteenth-Century Books”
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“How Tiny Red Dots Took Over Your Life” (on smartphone notifications)
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“How Heat Is Transferred” (1960s heat pipe for cooking)
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“Rubrication Typora blog theme”, sohalsdr
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“World’s First Classical Chinese Programming Language: Programs written in the language include one for fortune-telling from the I Ching” (homepage)
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pg63, The Elements of Typographic Style (third edition), Bringhurst 200420ya:
…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.
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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…↩︎
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Tufte routinely uses rubrication in his graphs & sparklines to emphasize key numbers or points: his 200618ya 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.↩︎
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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.↩︎
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Is saying that rubrication works because it ‘maximizes contrast’ question-begging?↩︎
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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.↩︎
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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.↩︎
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“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 201113ya 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.
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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.↩︎
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Curiously, although Apple did make heavy use of rubrication at some times, like its 199529ya Apple Macintosh Performa 600 Series User Manual, post-1997 Apple appears devoid of that technique. Did Steve Jobs not like red?↩︎
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This is likely from Mark Lombardi: Global Networks, ed Hobbs 200321ya, 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 200321ya 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.↩︎
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The TikZ community uses rubrication heavily, as can be seen in the TikZ example gallery. Examples which use red:
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simple examples: “Rainbows—Sun ray entering a rain drop”/“The 3dplot package”/“GNUPLOT basics”/“Annotated manipulator”/“Andler optimal lot-size”/“Polarization state of light”
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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.↩︎
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Tufte notes (pg142, Visual Explanations 199727ya) 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 1856168ya, we cannot fault Youmans for attempting to preempt such criticism.↩︎
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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”, 1936.↩︎
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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 193688ya February 26 Incident).↩︎
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Hitler, in Mein Kampf, discusses the design of flags in detail, and notes of the Nazi flag:
And so, up to 1920104ya, 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 1918106ya 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 1920104ya 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.
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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.↩︎
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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 201311ya, 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‽↩︎
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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 2013.↩︎
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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.↩︎
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MS 35254 also offers some extraordinarily elaborate historiated initials—so much so I didn’t realize until reading the captions!↩︎
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Tymms 1860164ya includes many interesting color plates which use red starting on pg104, but most I wouldn’t consider as examples of rubrication, specifically.↩︎