True to form, I would start with a brief story of what brought this to be. In this case, however, I feel that the reason I feel necessary to write a defense in favor of color as a semantic component is… Well, speculation. To be honest, I don’t know if my silly little conspiracy theory is sound, so it’s not something mine to tell.
Suffice to say, I’ll shortly begin talking about colors and stand firmly within their side. Or not so firmly as I’m well aware of problems associated with them, but we’ll get to that, we’ll get to that.
First I have to address the date. Yes, I know it’s still November. Yes, I know NaNoWriMo is still in effect. I’ll refrain from commenting on that subject until December arrives, however. It’s just how my head works, I suppose, but I don’t want to talk about my experience with NaNo while others are undergoing their own; the time to talk about experiences is after them, you don’t wax philosophically about the feeling of falling to earth in the middle of a bungee jump. So, NaNo talk only after NaNo month.
So, we arrive at colors. See, I’ve felt slightly upset about a certain event that cut out the use of color coding. Some people who read this, most that do at the time of this writing, in fact, will know what event I refer to. But for those who don’t, well, it’s of no consequence. I don’t believe this will change what happened about one year ago. It’s just that this itch decided to make itself evident and, to be honest, why not write about it?
The argument against the use of colors as a semantic component is heavily reliant on aesthetics and readability. Certain colors combinations are hard to read, some are just plain ugly, and in the end, we write in flat black font in white paper.
I agree with part of the concerns regarding the abuse of color coding. Color selection is a very real problem; we have to consider the colorblind here as well as the general audience. But bear with me for a moment… Don’t we use italics, bold, “quotes” (and parenthetical remarks), as well as underlining and strikethrough as valid textual elements?
Striketrhough means something was discarded. But it’s still shown and available to the readers, thus, a thought once had but no longer considered, is still relevant. If the fact that the words that were cut out are still in the document isn’t important, why are they actually there then? It’s a layer of interpretation, by the mere presence of a line over words.
Underlining, bold, italics and quotations are often used to create emphasis. Different authors highlight certain key words differently; I personally favor italics over quotes, and quotes over all of the others. But others are different in their layers of preference with regards to emphasis.
However! These are also often used to indicate speech patterns, and nuances of spoken language that don’t carry over through text. Sarcasm being a very clear example of such a case, when someone would quote or apply italics to an otherwise normal sentence, that, once taken within that context indicate that the actual intended meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning of the words.
Woe upon those who disregard context in the evaluation of grammatical elements.
Parenthesis are mostly stand-alone in the sense that they offer snippets of information that don’t fit within normal sentence structure; what difference do they present compared to footnotes when both serve for the same function? That is a question for a whole blog post by itself.
But instead of delving deeper into that particular path, let me state the point I hope to have made clear with the above examples: different shapes are accepted as semantic components. When transcribing a work, quotes and parenthesis and underlines are respected and carried over.
Why would colors be treated differently?
Well… It’s complicated. I could even say that when the subject is that of colors, things do become rather gray, but someone would attempt to kill me for that pun.
But first, the problems. First and foremost, colors do not have inherent meaning. Why, yes, we do use red to mean stop and green to mean go. Yellow is often associated with hunger, white for peace and black for grief and mourning, and so on and so forth… In general.
For the Japanese, white is the color of death, not black. Thus, context destroys a semblance of inherent meaning. Colors are, and I do agree that they should be, treated culturally and contextually.
That does become a problem in a context free, general analysis. Red does mean stop in traffic, but it actually means target in an archery range. So, in the sense that I’ll focus on writing as the medium in question, the meaning of colors should be clearly stated. Or be part of the reading in itself. If that is respected, there’s only two points that stand against the use of color as meaning, and one is rather self-defeating.
The outright ban on color coding strikes me as a bit overzealous. Because these remaining problems actually work together to balance the tool usage.
First of which and the major one is taking into account the colorblind, as I’ve mentioned before. If someone has enough vision and understanding to discern the shapes of the characters, then that same someone is certainly capable of discerning shapes of quotations and parenthesis. Barring special cases which I may not be aware of.
For color, this can’t be assumed to be true. And taking that into account, the selection of which colors to use, or which combination of artifacts to use, such as combining both color and shape, takes precedence. A poor choice would make a substantial part of the work unreadable to a potential part of the intended audience. Just to make it clear: restricting access is bad.
But then take into account the second point, that same restriction of access on grounds of both usability and aesthetics… Color coding, haphazard and reckless use of rainbow flashes of light are ugly as a sin and utterly unappealing. Why, that’s not a bad thing then. This appeals to me as a balance measure: if your audience decides to refrain from reading your material on grounds that it is “headache inducing”, then it is time to take measures to improve its quality.
Measures which can be either removing color altogether, which is easy and plain black over white is something no one will complain about. Or bash your head against the walls and come up with a better color coding system, which requires research and effort.
We all know what most people would choose. So, this is where I end my rant. Though I still have some things to share. But my point is that colors are not bad, they’re only badly used sometimes, if you’re careful they can be really interesting to use.
If you stay around you’ll see, and we might even have fun with it.
If you stay around you’ll see, and we might even have fun with it.
Just understand that, if you think both sentences have the same meaning, you’re in for a, marvelous, surprise.
I suppose this can be a rather polemic topic, so as usual, the comments are open. But I’ll note it here that everyone is more than welcome to share their thoughts on this matter. Do you disagree? Black over white forever? Why? Do you have other difficulties with color that I’m the one blind to? Just some questions to spark thoughts, if you’re willing to share yours.
An odd place to sleep 
I’m thinking about The Neverending Story, which, when properly done, is printed in two different colors. That’s the correct way to present that book. However, in cheap editions where two different kinds of ink would be two expensive, they use two different typefaces or have italicized/romanized text, and it’s just not as good a reading experience.
My frame of reference is a bit different, but video games tend to get the right means to use it, often highlighting things in appropriate category colors, for example. But for narrative itself, Umineko no Naku Koro ni is one outstanding Visual Novel that would actually be impossible to completely understand without the green and red highlights.
Another book that has a very particular taste in typography is House of Leaves, and that one is all over the place, to the point of sometimes putting words upside down and stretching footnotes within footnotes within footnotes for whole chapters. It’s one of the cases where trying to change anything, be it the (admittedly few) instances of colored text or the way the words are arranged on the pages would completely change the reading.