Design's gray areas

Color blindness affects about ten percent of the human population. Which means if you're a commercial artist, someone out there has had to interpret your work in grayscale. Even for experienced black and white film photographers, knowing what looks good sans color is tricky business. Enter: We are colorblind.com. The site highlights existing problems, like this one:


where the design actually gets in the way of usability for those who can't see the difference between pink and taupe. It also offers suggestions, many of which make for good design whether you're colorblind or not, like using rollover hints in addition to a legend, and skipping pie charts entirely.

This brings me to another, bigger thought: everything we design and write as professionals is made, inevitably, for strangers. Making ideas make sense to someone else is the basic challenge of living in a society, and it's our job, at the most fundamental level, to keep exploring new, better ways of doing it.

Good luck.


via monkey_bites.