I find a white background (for commonly used black text) to be quite harsh on my eyes and don't like it much. So when I had to redesign the UI for an applicatio

I find a white background (for commonly used black text) to be quite harsh on my eyes and don't like it much. So when I had to redesign the UI for an application, I went from a pure white background to a more grayish background (a bit further from #ffffff, in the #eX series), which had a good level of contrast with the text color (a very dark blue) while not appearing blinding. Contrast is very important for all (and also from the accessibility point of view), and the article shows some really awful contrast levels in the screenshots.