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Another Illustration of Color Blindness

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Further to my previous post on the subject of red/green color blindness, I’ve attempted to create a more everyday illustration of how I see the world.

The following two images look pretty much the same to me:

I’m pretty sure that a normal sighted person should be able to spot the badly drawn red flowers on one of these two shrubs. Several times in my life people have drawn my attention to the "beautiful flowers" on some tree, and I have just stared like an idiot going: "What…? Where…?"

And perhaps you can imagine how annoying and embarrassing it was for me back in the sixth grade, playing cricket and searching for the ball [red] in thick grass, before I knew I was color blind. Wicket keepers would angrily shout across the field: "IT’S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU!" as the opposing team racked up the runs. Maybe that’s what put me off sport…

Simple is better, isn’t it?

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As of today I have changed the whole look and feel of the blogsite. Gone (for now) are:

  1. The Georgia font, which although very readable is a real pain in the ass for its ridiculous digits where the zero looks like an o. The font now defaults to whatever your browser is set to use, which means good ol’ Times New Roman if you’re on Windows with default settings. Compare TNR’s sensible uniformly sized digits: 0123456789 with Georgia ‘s pretty but jumbly ones: 0123456789
  2. Sidebars, with junk that added too much visual clutter. I figure that anything really important can just be added at the top. Also sidebars make life difficult for handheld devices and other alternative browsing platforms.
  3. Scripts. Why use Javascript unless it’s necessary? I was using it for dynamically updatable sidebars, but since they’re gone, there’s no need for scripts.

I have also added an index page linking to all online entries [2 years' worth] by title, so that should be useful for those that like to browse.

I’m still unsure about issues like fixed-width vs variable. I really like the idea of a page collapsing as much as possible to fit the browser width, but I really really hate trying to read text that extends all the way across a high resolution full screen window. All I really want is the ability to set a maximum width proportional to the font size, but to the best of my knowledge this is impossible with vanilla HTML/CSS. For now I’ll go with variable width.

Hopefully I will continue to like this new minimal styling, and hopefully my visitors will too. I’ve tried this approach before, and it always ends up growing complicated again, but maybe I’m finally over the desire to add more-more-more and can keep things simple from now on. We shall see.