3 ms·

I find too many web pages go the other way and use a light gray for the text. The text looks washed out. Too little contrast is as bad as too much.

• crazygringo 14y ago
  Absolutely. Too much contrast is bad for long-term readability, but too little contrast is bad for short-term readability! Finding the right level of contrast is just as important as finding the right font size, the right width for your text column, the right typeface, etc...
  • alexanderh 14y ago
    What we need is a javascript library that slowly lightens the text over time :P Starts off black and moves to lighter shades the longer you're reading the page. I'm only kidding, but it would be sorta interesting.
    • jayunit 14y ago
      not exactly that, but related: http://stereopsis.com/flux/ http://stereopsis.com/flux/
      • icebraining 14y ago
        There's also redshift: http://jonls.dk/redshift/ http://jonls.dk/redshift/
        • tripzilch 14y ago
          those tools are really nice, it's just that I use graphics programs and other tools that really benefit from an accurate depiction of colour way too often. even websites that talk about colours. for instance I'd have to disable flux before I can trust the colours in the images of this particular article, right? and flux had like what, three configuration sliders or so? this redshift program seems better because at least it's scriptable in its "one-shot" modus. I don't know how, but it would be great if someone could come up with a tool that does for your eyes what Flux does, but on the other hand doesn't muck up applications and instances that really do benefit from an accurate depiction of colour. If someone is looking for a "problem that needs solving", here it is :)
• CamperBob2 14y ago
  The risk when using grays instead of black and white is that what looks perfectly readable on the writer's monitor may not look good at all on the reader's. The more you rely on midtones, including grayscale-based design choices, the more you are at the mercy of the end user's probably-completely-screwed-up monitor. Many of us who use multiple monitors on our PCs are all too familiar with how hard it is to achieve consistency when dragging a window between displays. Every time I swap out a monitor on my main PC, it usually takes me about an hour of screwing around with the Nvidia control panel before I'm satisfied with the match between my new monitor and the existing one(s). I'd guess that most users with only a single monitor aren't even aware that they can change the brightness, contrast, and gamma of individual RGB components. What that means is that spending hours tweaking your design for "just the right contrast" is guaranteed to be a waste of time. Web designers working in the real world need to make conservative choices, and that means higher contrast is almost always better than lower.
  • vacri 14y ago
    Even with good monitors, some of us are tired of the trendiness of greyscale designs and see them as just as dated as it is using green text on black to suggest 'hacker'.
    • tripzilch 14y ago
      Oh can we please bring back the green-on-black? I VASTLY prefer it to the greyish-on-greyish! :) But now I wonder, green-on-black is of course based on the old CRT monitors. But in those days you also had orange-on-black monitors, is there any reason why that never caught on in hacker circles? Or was the green-on-black just that much more ubiquitous. I gotta admit, I did write my first code on a classic green-on-black display ... but friends of me had different models of computers and just as many were orange-on-black (or very early colour models and of course TV monitors).