The logo in the article I see just fine, and all of the squares are the same size. And I get it... Metro theme.
The favicon.ico and small logo on Microsoft.com
Those don't fair as well. The red and yellow squares are much larger than the green and blue, and my eyes see a throbbing line around the bottom and left of the red box, and a black line at the bottom of the blue box.
Now... I know that those boxes don't have those lines. For I know what the Metro style guide looks like. But there it is, the logo has not been viewed by anyone colour blind with the ability to have it modified. There should be more space between the boxes when it's shrunk.
The red box is literally 20% wider than the blue to my eyes.
You know how much of the population is colour blind? A very significant chunk.
Also... those colours... very bad choice. When you print this logo (greyscale), all of the colours come out too similar a shade of grey. There is no distinction between them.
The differing lines and popping squares are not because of your color-blindness, someone did an absolutely terrible job resizing the logo images for the website and preparing the favicon.
Also, rounded corners on the favicon? It's ok to give these jobs to an intern but someone still should check the results before pushing them live.
They either resized a bitmap image or they rasterized a vector image that wasn't properly aligned, thus some of the squares have some of the borders antialiased and the space between squares appears to be wider between some than others. Also, they are different colors with different lightness levels and that has additional impact on the appearance of different width of the empty space.
This has nothing to do with color-blindness, I can see it, too (I was non-color-blind enough for my driver's licence.)
Actually I just tried to "fix" the favicon in Photoshop and even if I aliase the edges manually it still doesn't look right because of the different brightness levels.
I'm part of that colour-blind chunk, and I don't see anything like what you're seeing. The squares appear to be an uneven size, but what would that have to do with our lack of ability to see colour?
Colour-blindness comes in a great many varieties, and to be honest, if you're making something involving colour, you're going to displease some of them.
Arguably (for this logo) seemingly wrong proportions are worse than too similar looking shades of grey, since no writing or visual metaphors lost are lost when you convert this logo to greyscale.
And I personally believe that this could (and should) have been worked around in some way since about 7-10% of the population has some kind of color blindness.
Your post and the one below make me think I need to go back to my optician. It's probably overdue, but I can't actually look at the smaller version of the logo without it hurting my eyes a little as they strain to stop the red square from throbbing.
I have the same issues; for me the red is much larger than the rest and the yellow one is pulsating. I have it with everything involving rasters and some colors. Actually some patterns make me nauseous (not this one though).
I'm not bothered much by it, but I avoid, while making things, combinations that make this happen.
I don't know if it is because I am slightly color blind (on tests I can usually read maybe 1 of those blotted spots with letters/digits in them; http://www.toledo-bend.com/colorblind/Ishihara.asp => I can only see the top left one, which is the tester if you're not totally blind I think :), the rest is just random spots. People who don't have this issue might think I cannot see colors at all but I can; it's only in combination it might go wrong.), but it's worse when i'm tired.
The best freak show is a big squared 'tent', but with small squares of 2 horrible colors, like red + green/blue in bright power-saving-lights inside, for instance, a shopping mall and me not having had the best night sleep. Then I see these effects really well and actually have to move away from the offending object quite rapidly.
I'm not color blind, but I see the same thing. Shading creates the effect of the boxes being different sizes even though they're not. Here's a screenshot:
I have 2 computers here, both with very good monitors and both displaying the same effect:
1 x NEC MultiSync PA271W monitor
1 x Thinkpad X220 with IPS panel
Perhaps it is a result of the IPS panels in both? The NEC is a high-end monitor though and even with a cheaper IPS panel in the laptop I wouldn't expect to see any flaw that is the result of the monitor in the NEC.
I am slightly colour blind.
The logo in the article I see just fine, and all of the squares are the same size. And I get it... Metro theme.
The favicon.ico and small logo on Microsoft.com
Those don't fair as well. The red and yellow squares are much larger than the green and blue, and my eyes see a throbbing line around the bottom and left of the red box, and a black line at the bottom of the blue box.
Now... I know that those boxes don't have those lines. For I know what the Metro style guide looks like. But there it is, the logo has not been viewed by anyone colour blind with the ability to have it modified. There should be more space between the boxes when it's shrunk.
The red box is literally 20% wider than the blue to my eyes.
You know how much of the population is colour blind? A very significant chunk.
Also... those colours... very bad choice. When you print this logo (greyscale), all of the colours come out too similar a shade of grey. There is no distinction between them.