Each of these online issues generally consists of two or three items which were also featured in the printed version. But here these items present opportunities to test new ways of browsing through image and text combinations, developing even more engaging means of communication. The editors and designers consistently try out various interface experiments, ranging from innovative approaches to tired gimmicks. In the Smoke issue, a 3D smoke cloud provides the main navigation through statements about its toxic contents. In its design, this interface comes surprisingly close to current designs for associative information browsers. Its subtle use of substance names, which come up or disappear in the cloud, coupled with text which pops up at a twist of the mouse, makes for an almost seamless interface. At least as impressive is the example from the Death issue, where you need to 'scan' the corpse of a naked man to call up questioning statements on the nature of death. This almost tactile interface adds an extra eerie dimension to the subject, not suited to the weak at heart! Among the more light-hearted contributions the Fat issue and the Time issue stand out . In the Fat issue for instance, 'The Ideal Body' utilises Shockwave to allow the users to experiment with the images of naked bodies, varying their ideal proportions in width and height. 'How Fat is your World' uses the zoom-option in Flash to visualise the imbalance of world food consumption. Some continents swell to enormous proportions representing their abundance, some shrink to represent their shortage. In the Time-issue your patience is tried when presented a large scrolling text that starts out with the statement that you have to brace yourself to scroll vertically through an X-amount of pixels to read the entire text. The text subsequently goes into a rant about the shortage of your attention span, telling you that chances are nil that you'll make it to the end of this boring flat text.

It is this immediate address of the user and the attempt to engage them that is aimed for in most of the items in Colors online. Though not always successful due to the limitations of the present tools I have the feeling that with the rise of java-programming and active server pages we can expect a lot more enticing pieces of work from these designers in the near future.