ColoRama

Colour and Contrasts

Colour and contrast play an important role in visual communication. The higher the contrast, between forground and background. the better is the legibility. Because colour also influences the way we read, it does not have to be allways black on white.

The following text is blindtext and does not have a sense in particular. Its purpose is only to test legibility. We returned from The Dalles to Portland by the way we had come, the steamer stopping en route to pick up a night's catch of one of the salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver it at a cannery down-stream. When the proprietor of the wheel announced that his take was two thousand two hundred and thirty pounds weight of fish, "and not a heavy catch neither," I thought he lied. But he sent the boxes aboard, and I counted the salmon by the hundred--huge fifty-pounders hardly dead, scores of twenty and thirty pounders, and a host of smaller fish.

They were all Chenook salmon, as distinguished from the "steel head" and the "silver side." That is to say, they were royal salmon, and California and I dropped a tear over them, as monarchs who deserved a better fate; but the lust of slaughter entered into our souls, and we talked fish and forgot the mountain scenery that had so moved us a day before. The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse built on piles in a lonely reach of the river, and sent in the fish. I followed them up a scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the cannery.

The crazy building was quivering with the machinery on its floors, and a glittering bank of tin scraps twenty feet high showed where the waste was thrown after the cans had been punched. Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils as they crossed the rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor. When our consignment arrived, the rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as they were dumped down under a jet of water, and the salmon burst out in a stream of quicksilver.

A Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded and detailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal arrangements with a third, and case it into a blood-dyed tank. The headless fish leaped from under his hands as though they were facing a rapid. Other Chinamen pulled them from the vat and thrust them under a thing like a chaff-cutter, which, descending, hewed them into unseemly red gobbets fit for the can.