h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"Also the colour combination with the most impact and most easily read from distances is yellow on black background, closely followed by black on yellow background - presumably why Police accident signs, etc are in this combination."

Indeed so. When I worked for a small software house which produced the public information screens for Train Stations and Bus Stations (you know, the train/bus platfor/time/delay screens you get) we had contact some expert or other in this field and yellow on black and yellow on blue were the top two options we were given. Yellow on Blue is apparently very easy to read for those with visual impairment.
For monitors that is. Not sure about black on yellow, I'd have thought the huge block background of yellow would impinge on the black lettering and thus cause it to be difficult to read.

Absolutely! Black on white should be the default option. With dark backgrounds, certain colour combinations become highly problematic. Black backgrounds used to be prefered in the days of high-flicker screens and low-refresh phosphors. This problem has (largely) gone away.

My heuristic for user interface design: Design it to work in black and white. Add colour only if you are sure that it won't distract.

This is a long way from English. Shall we start an Ergonomics thread?

In the 1980s, I did data entry as a job, working as a 'temp' for agencies. Many screens had green lettering on a darker green screen - horrible in a brightly lit room, but the worst, was *red on black* which was a complete toyota to read! Extremely painful.

We still had the 'green screen' dumb terminals in the office until last year!

Ah, but all high tech computer systems use green screens, don;t you watch hollywood hacker films? And not only that, but using just 2 colours, green and black, they can display photo realistic pictures as well!

Tch, you want amber and black screens really

"a complete toyota"
Is that just a random usage of a word or is there some logic in there I don;t know? NZ Rhyming slang?

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Oh yeah, I'd forgotten that... are these the same 'puters that project the display on the face of the user and make a 'beep' noise whenever they press a key?

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You mean like on the Logica Kennet?

(notes, with gratitude, the attempt to drag the topic back to English)

Glasgow's rhyming slang is quite distinct from that of London. Often it relies on local pronunciations. Examples:

Ruby = Ruby Murray = Curry
Joe Baxi = Taxi (and I've been trying, in vain, to discover who Joe Baxi was)
Mick Jagger = Lager
Salvador Dali = Swally (the a's are short) = Drink
Corned Beef = Deaf
The Teddy Bears = The Gers = Glasgow Rangers Football Club (Local ned fashion: You can by baby snowsuits in Rangers colours with a teddy bear motif).
Hammie = Ham shank = ....same as 'Barclays', 'Sherman' and 'Jodrell'

Ruby is not Glaswegian, it's Brummie!

And, interestingly (maybe ), the taxi company which has the contract for the shuttle minibus between where I work and the train station was founded by a bloke with the surname of.....Baxi!
Although not Joe, as far as I am aware.

Ruby is pretty universal these days. It may have originated in Brummingham.

RF

To go back to colours : I find that red writing on blue just dances in front of my eyes - whether on paper or on a screen.

Does no one else agree that, due to its mainly being used for books and newspapers, Times Roman, or other prints with serifs, just look too serious and somehow harder to dispute.

If the little tags are called serifs, what are the rounded ends called - like little dots, for example at the end of a small "r", or on the ends of an "s"? Hmmm .. I have searched for an example, but can only find one called "duality" at the moment. I thought this sort of thing was quite common. And what are the squares at the end called - as in "Wanted" posters in Western films?

And as we're having trouble getting back to the English language - it can't be that after 10500 posts and more, and more, that we have actually exhausted all the intricacies - can it?

Anybody read "Going Postal" yet? There's a greengrocer who talk's like this - with apostrophe's all over the place.

It really made me laugh out loud - does that make me ?

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Ach, I should have realised! In about 2000, Toyota had a series of adverts for a pick-up truck, which featured various farcical accidents on farms, ewhich always ended with someone saying 'B*gger! So, toyota became (in our family) a replacement word for Bugg*r, even though Toyota sell spare wheel covers with the word emblazoned on them! But I mean I should have realised that these adverts were shown only in NZ...

Interestingly enough, there was a complaint to the Boradcasting Standards authority about the adverts, and they ruled that the word is acceptable in polite society - but I don't know how h2g2 and the BBC feel about the word.

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I get theat with blue writing on red, gives me an awful headache.

Didn't notice the greengrocer in Goign Postal... but I was ill at the time so I can be forgiven.

Red on blue: They each require the eye to focus at different lengths. The eye is trying to move back and forth between the two colours. Sometimes it can cause a disturbing 3-d illusion.

The word 'bugger' is interesting, isn't it? I had a conversation with my Czech friend about this recently (she demonstrates her excellent command of English by saying 'bugger' frequently). It's thought of as much milder than 'F---'. Yet the act of buggery is generally regarded as more taboo than f---ing.

To Czechs, such earthy matters are less taboo anyway. My god! You should take a look in the basement sections of their high street video rental stores!

I've already posted this elsewhere, but last year the great Eddie Mair spoke the following opening headline on R4's PM show: 'Sinn Fein say the British government are buggers."

Yeah, planting bugs

Another one I heard on the news one time:

"These allegations are unfounded. I call on the allegators to be more responsible!"

Surely Allegatorisaionists is the proper term?

Crocodiles is easier on the tongue!

Blue/yellow certainly makes sense from a colour vision point of view, since most colourblind people would have no problems seeing it.

*Avoids yet another monologuet about mental primary colours, and the special subjective brightness of yellow*

Optimal colours for readability can also depend on the resolution of the text and the quaility of the display in less obvious ways.
With my old BBC micro running via an aerial input (limited bandwidth) of a TV in a high resolution mode (a bit too high for the resolution of the TV tube), the best colours for readability for text was actually blue/cyan or cyan/blue (ie, differing only in green).
Having a difference between foreground and background in only one colour channel (ie green) actually made things easier to read, for various reasons probably best not expanded on here here

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Not having ever quite understood colour blindness, I wonder how you mean that. Don't people who are blue/yellow colour blind have trouble differentiating at all between blue and yellow? Which would mean that they couldn't see the writing at all if yellow were printed on blue?

Yes, there are many, many different kinds of achromatopia, also known as 'Daltonism'.

The normal human eye is most sensitive in the greeny-yellow part of the specrum. But Black and White inevitably give the highest contrast.

Think about it: Why is so much effort put into bleaching wood pulp? And why were squid ink and candle black considered the best for making marks? The printing solution has evolved over centuries.