Testing Colours for Irritation Factor
See just how intensely hideous the page can be. And this is with the simplest of HTML - imagine how truly horrifying it could be if the borders and margins were garishly coloured too. If stylesheets(CSS) are disabled, you're not being subjected to the eyestrain resulting from looking at these awful colour combinations. If you are colour blind, you may find that this page is nearly impossible to read because the text color is as intense as the background color, and there isn't sufficient contrast to discern which is which..
At first it might not seem too bad, but imagine a whole lot of text. And then if that text is italicized, made bold, a larger font, (or possibly worse: a smaller font is used, the irritation bar is raised to a higher level.
Please hit the "actual link" link to see the horrifying result when half the links are visited and half are not. And if an actual link and a false link are embedded in the text, it gets worse and worse.
It looks about as frightening with the "school" green as the background colour. The actual link and false link embedded in the text do not work well. The italic, bold, larger font and smaller fonts are the same bad. Of course, this sort of thing can be fixed by declaring the colours in CSS only (which was not done on this page - prepare for shuddering, disable CSS and see another nightmare), but chances are that a person who has chosen this sort of colour scheme may not know anything about CSS and may be using an ancient HTML editor that doesn't support CSS anyway. |
Conclusion
The colours here are only one version that many people will find to be intensely irritating on the eyes. Yellow text on a large bright blue background is pretty awful too. I suppose that if any of the intense colours that are opposite on the colour wheel are juxtaposed, they are going to make one dizzy.
Please, choose your colours carefully.
websafe 216 colour chart | "named" colour chart | horrible colour combo demo
