Rubrication

Scribes reserved red ink for the parts of a manuscript that had to work: section openings, instructions to the reader, the first words of something new. The practice is called rubrication, from Latin ruber, red — and it appears independently across manuscript cultures, from European liturgical texts to South Asian palm-leaf traditions, where red marks headings, emphasis, and the edges of things.

The accent color on this site is used under the same discipline. It appears when something is structural — a link under your cursor, the mark that ends a page — and never as decoration. If you notice red here, it is asking you to do something or telling you where you are.

A constraint like this is easy to state and surprisingly hard to keep. Most modern “brand colors” are rubrication that forgot its job.