Bright red text in content is a fresh blood stain on a white carpet. It’s the first thing people see—and the last thing they want to see.
Red words draw attention away from everything else and rarely convey good news. They’re stop signs, not guide signs. Red, after all, is the color of financial losses and failing grades. Have you ever heard Captain Picard say “green alert” when the Romulans open fire?
I’m noticing an increase in red text in marketing and sales copy these days. It’s as if red text were just another way to provide emphasis, like bold and italics. But red doesn’t create emphasis as much as it does gravity. It pulls the reader away from everything else on the page.
I’ve recently seen:
- Bullet items starting with red text
- Intro paragraphs entirely in red
- Company names in red in body text
- Red hyperlinks
- Multiple red CTAs with different functions on websites and in email
If you must emphasize these things, do it through design and typeface choices. If you still insist on using red for things that aren’t truly important, don’t be surprised if readers don’t pay attention when you use red to denote something critical. (Aesop. “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Aesop’s Fables. Perry Index 210.)
This also goes for internal communications. “See my responses below in red” is alarming. “See my responses below in green” is not.
Green is my go-to color for responding to emails. I’m married to a university professor. When we first started dating, I saw him grading a stack of paper—this was a while ago—with a green pen.
“Why not red?” I asked.
“Red’s a confrontation,” he said. “Green’s a conversation.”
He explalined that the ink doesn’t have to be green. It just needs to be any color but red.
When I told him I was planning to write this post, I asked him what he’d do if I sent him a note in red ink.
“I would assume you’d been kidnapped and were sending me a signal,” he said.
He gets me. Total green flag. Why would anyone settle for a red one?
