User Comments

Oh dear. You’re playing with fire by criticising Coudal mate. Watch your back - the blogosphere will not take kindly to this.

Anyway I happen to agree. I think the idea of dynamic colors is great, but it would be better if they were handpicked. I agree with your assumption that they are machine-generated. The cover image has changed today (since you wrote your entry) and, again, the link colors are not visible enough.

But perhaps we are being unfair to be so negative. The design is new and they will probably have to tweak things for a while yet.

You’re playing with fire by criticising Coudal mate. Watch your back - the blogosphere will not take kindly to this.

I don’t think I need to worry mate. With my small readership the post will go largely unnoticed! :-(

The design is new and they will probably have to tweak things for a while yet.

Oh I agree. You have to appreciate that I’m not criticising Coudal. I think the redesign is fantastic and, as always, it’s the content that’s king and Coudal’s content is sublime.

I was merely trying to illustrate that there are a couple of issues with the dynamic palette system. I’m sure that they will be ironed out in time.

Thanks for the comments. We are still tweaking the variable color palette procedure and I just updated the current scheme at the site. Here’s the crux of the problem. In general we are very sensitive to the overall ‘color’ of the typography and are set against making the links bold or doing anything that gives the flow of the text a ‘choppy’ or broken-up feel. On the other hand, we also want the links to be easy to discern. Sometimes these two things are in opposition, especially when the palette demands a blue or green color for the links.

Our solution is to try and strike a balance between these two goals. To clean up the page even further, we’ve decided to indicate visited links with a simple light underline. Once a reader had acknowledged a link by clicking on it it seems appopriate to have that link blend back into the flow of the rest of the text. Time will tell how the system works out but we do appreciate the input we get from chekcing our referrer logs and finding discussions like this one…

Thanks for responding Coudal. It was good to hear from you and great to know that you are “still tweaking the variable color palette procedure”. I suspected you might be.

Like everyone else who has ever created a web-page, I appreciate the difficulties with green and blue link colours - they are so difficult to get right with a black-on-white page.

we’ve decided to indicate visited links with a simple light underline. Once a reader had acknowledged a link by clicking on it it seems appopriate to have that link blend back into the flow of the rest of the text. Time will tell how the system works out

Indeed. I’ve been using the same mechanism here (underlined links, visited links take on the body-text colour). It seems to work okay or, at least, nobody’s told me otherwise.

I am absolutely certain that the “variable color palette” will work out in the end. Your continual tweaks will ultimately achieve the right balance between aesthetics and usability.

One thing I’m still not sure about: Is the palette selection programatically achieved, or not?

“One thing I’m still not sure about: Is the palette selection programatically achieved, or not?”

The only way to do it properly is by hand, but we’ve used a few tricks to make that quick and easy.