Glorious technicolour?
Be sparing in your use of colour in your emails or forum posts.
Writing an email entirely in one colour other than plain, sensible black is a bit like using stationery – it just suggests that you’re new to using email and are playing with the colours just because you’ve discovered they exist. So it’s bad for your image, especially in the office.
Some people think it’s clever to post on a forum in a different colour from everyone else because it will make their posts stand out more. Wrong. Writing entirely in bold red, blue or purple writing isn’t likely to impress anyone – it just marks the writer as an ignorant Yahoo who thinks that what they’ve got to say is more important than anyone else’s contribution. Besides, it’s self-defeating; if everyone else has the same idea then no-one’s posts are emphasised, so you end up with a psychedelic mess instead of a discussion.
Better to stick to black, unless there’s something exceptionally important in your posting that you particularly want to highlight. Important to others, that is, not to you. And even then, consider whether it’s so important that bold text alone isn’t enough to stress the point.
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