[Design] Re: e-mail feature suggestion - msgs received recently

[Don Dwiggins]

My take on this thread is that there's two people arguing about 
_the best_ way to represent a particular attribute of some entity. 
In passing, Philip mentions his IM client, whose developers 
apparently didn't try to guess what that should be, but allowed 
for alternatives, I guess via something like themes or plugins.

As a user, I like that approach: don't try to guess what's 
meaningful to me, or what I would choose to represent with color 
(or whether I'm color blind).

To enrich the available options: Philip says:
> Color does have one major advantage over other representations 
> of information - it takes up no additional screen real estate.
This is also mostly true of font/face distinctions.  You could use 
bold, italic, type size, and/or font family distinctions to signal 
values of some attribute.  (E.g., new messages in 14 pt. bold 
serif, very old messages in 6 pt. sans.)

Of course, this approach is costlier to implement than just wiring 
in the developer's choice; I wouldn't expect to see it for Kibble.
--   Don Dwiggins		  I'm sorry for creating such a
complex design, don at dondwiggins.net       but I didn't have time
to make a simple one.  -- Hermann Püterschein