Adactio: Journal—Style your underlines
August 25, 2025
We shouldn’t rely on colour alone to indicate that something is interactive.
Take links, for example. Sure, you can give them a different colour to the surrounding text, but you shouldn’t stop there. Make sure there’s something else that distinguishes them. You could make them bold. Or you could stick with the well-understood convention of underlying links.
This is where some designers bristle. If there are a lot of links on a page, it could look awfully cluttered with underlines. That’s why some designers would rather remove the underline completely.
For designers, underlines can be a point of contention. On the web, they’ve always indicated that something in the text has been clickable. But in print, traditionally, the underline is very sparingly used.
Here Jeremy Keith looks at how With modern CSS we have a little bit more to play with when it comes to underlines than simply the binary on/off.
