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First time I read an argument against all black in design was this 2012 article. Something about it not being a color found in nature. Then, yeah, some people s
by kdazzle 3y ago
First time I read an argument against all black in design was this 2012 article. Something about it not being a color found in nature. Then, yeah, some people seemed to interpret it as “use gray on gray”.
https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/ https://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/
- amelius 3y agoFunny, all these strange glyphs also don't seem to appear in nature ...
- gumby 3y agoThere is a theory that the reason those glyphs (in most languages, whether characters or ideograms) tend to have a similar, conservative aspect ratio is that they use a part of the early visual system that was useful in finding/tracking footprints (evidence of prey or threats) In the case of characters, especially hanzi/kanji, ones that are hard to recognize/distinguish either evolve (simplify and/or develop disambiguating features) or fall into disuse. Clearly “hard to recognize” is driven by physiological structures that are by definition “natural”
- amelius 3y agoIf true then why are Latin and Arabic glyphs so different?
- gumby 3y agoI wrote “in most languages” specifically thinking of Arabic-derived scripts, but don’t know of any others. Older scripts, and those descended from other roots, seem to have this property. Of course in practice Arabic writing is as easy or hard for humans to learn as any other system, so the evolutionary pressure/affordance to get rid of hard parts still applies. But the theory of early visual system affordance could in principle be studied (though I don’t think fmri is really solid enough yet). Any historical implications of course will always have to remain theoretical. Writing has technological constraints as well; look at cuneiform vs, say, Pali. Since Arabic evolved after predecessor systems already existed, technological affordances clearly had a, or the, major influence. Edit: I read your comment again, and just to be clear: your question is really “why is Arabic different”. Latin, Georgian, Aramaic, Brahmic, Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Maya pictographs, all have roughly the same form factor.
- lmm 3y agoThey're not?
- pmontra 3y agoBacklit screens are not found in nature too. Maybe 100% black is appropriate in that unnatural environment. It's great on my screen.
- layer8 3y agoWhat this argument overlooks is that pure black also isn’t found on computer displays. Even for OLED, black is really dark gray if you have any amount of ambient lighting. Displays are a part of nature in that sense.
- marcosdumay 3y agoThat is a very old lesson, for painting. A few things are truly black, because you don't get to see their color. But "nothing" has actually the color black. Anyway, even for painting, the fact that they have a paint for it means it happens on nature. It's just very rare, so everybody has to learn the lesson that no, you don't use black paint for that black thing you are seeing. For computer interfaces the entire thing is obviously bullshit since the beginning. But well, our area has a thing for accepting obvious bullshit.
- masswerk 3y agoMind that the site in question is from 2011 (compare the site-of-the-day link). So this is a reaction to trends even prior to this.
- mcdonje 3y agoThe central idea there is to tweak the darks to align with the color palette, not to just make them gray.
- davemp 3y agoI don’t get the “found in nature” arguments. We’ve likely been using black (carbon) markings for thousands of years.