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Design Systems

The Second Colour

·7 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

The PDF edition of this book is set in black with one other colour, and that colour has a single job: it marks the number of each essay on its opening page. The paperback, printed in black ink only, sets that number in black. Nothing else in either edition is red, so anyone can check the rule against the object itself. When we first argued for that discipline, we leaned on two laboratory results, one about what people remember and one about how quickly they find things, and joined them into a claim that neither supports.1 We still keep the rule, on plainer grounds than the ones we first gave.

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • What von Restorff and Treisman measured
  • Adding a second accent
  • Red under meta-analysis
  • The rubric, and what it cost
  • Tonhalle posters and the Vignelli Canon
  • Seeing the red, and paying for it
  • Keep one accent and give it one job

About the book

Notes

  1. Hunt 1995, Abstract: perceptual salience not necessary; difference insufficient without a similarity context; MacLeod 2020, Von Restorff section: Friedrich Wilhelm University, Berlin; Köhler’s supervision; Experiments 1–4; Wallace 1965, Bibliographic record. The dissertation was published as “Über die Wirkung von Bereichsbildungen im Spurenfeld”, Psychologische Forschung 18, 299–342. Hunt’s paper is a correction of the popular version of the effect; its body is paywalled, so we read the abstract and reference list. The effect has been much studied and was reviewed by Wallace in 1965, but we traced no replication count, so we do not repeat the common description of it as one of the most replicated findings in psychology. Evidence B: one credible study, or evidence with limits.

Sources

  • Hunt, R. R. (1995). The subtlety of distinctiveness: What von Restorff really did. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 2, 105-112. doi.org
  • MacLeod, C. M. (2020). Zeigarnik and von Restorff: The memory effects and the stories behind them. Memory & Cognition, 48. doi.org
  • Wallace, W. P. (1965). Review of the historical, empirical, and theoretical status of the von Restorff phenomenon. Psychological Bulletin, 63, 410-424. doi.org

Further reading