Styling tables presents lots of fun infodesign opportunities that are largely still untapped. Backbars is of course an example of that.

At a recent project, I stumbled on another subtle styling that I’m descriptively calling highlows from ignorance of precedents. Here it is, on the left part:

The idea is to highlight the first occurrence of a row value and to lowlight the next occurrences, until a new row value comes up and then the high switch is turned on again.

It’s a simple, useful way to help scan column values in category tables.