I occasionally do scale drawings for my job, and I occasionally have to remind my coworker that her nice pretty colorized drawings will look fucking atrocious when printed in greyscale on a shitty laser printer. She likes to color code things to make it easier to communicate info… But that often ends up making things harder on the crews who are actually executing things. Because when she used color to communicate something, but the entire drawing is printed in shades of grey to hand a hard copy to the crew, it becomes fucking impossible to actually follow the drawing.

For instance… The yellow circle is the one we need done today. Here’s what she draws:

Except here’s what the crew receives:

Now imagine if this was a watermark on every page of a 50 page court filing, which then gets printed out for the judge. Now they’re seeing text on the grey background, which likely makes it harder to read and is a massive waste of toner. It also massively inflates pdf file sizes, because you’re sending that image on every single page.