A Better Shade of Blue

Daniel Jalkut on Red Sweater’s blog:

A few weeks ago, I found myself staring at the about box for the app, and this default shade of blue stood out to me:

There’s nothing particularly wrong with it. It is, after all, the default color for all links. But I’m not sure anybody spent much time weighing the aesthetics of the default HTML colors. To my eye, the saturation reads “1990s” and “Windows”. When I see that default color on a web site, the site comes across as less refined. And suddenly, my app felt less refined as well. Here’s how the same default link looks in MarsEdit 5.0.5:

It’s just another arbitrary color, but it’s my choice. I think it looks nice. It’s a better shade of blue. I liked it so much I changed the default blue in MarsEdit’s Plain Text syntax highlighting as well.

I know this is a really simple change but it reminds me of what my thought process was when I made this website. I spent so much time trying to kill and default blue links that were around.

Also, the shade of blue Daniel Jalkut chose is damn near perfect.