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As someone mentioned, black text on a glowing white LED background is unnatural. Our eyes are not subjected to that anywhere else in life. "Eye strain" might b

by exodust 11y ago

As someone mentioned, black text on a glowing white LED background is unnatural. Our eyes are not subjected to that anywhere else in life. "Eye strain" might be overly dramatic, but certainly fatigue will happen earlier in bright contrasty reading conditions. Designers often want pure white backgrounds though, they love their white backgrounds! So the only improvement possible is to increase the text from #000 to something like #222. This does not mean the text won't look black anymore, it simply takes the edge off but still looks black. Obviously the lady's blog she wanted grey so she went with #444. Ideally though pure white background should be avoided if there's pages and pages of text to read. "Paper white" is what e-readers aim for. Thank God the Kindle app for tablets allows background colours to be reduced. I like the "newspaper white" tone, with a touch of sepia thrown in. Perfect! #FFF text on #000 background is the worst. Many designers I've worked with over the years agree. Paragraphs of text will "shimmer" due to the extreme contrast. If there's a lot of text on the page, never have it #fff on #000. Bring the white down a notch and/or the black up a notch. It will still look like white on black but just look softer and better.

jasode 11y ago
>Ideally though pure white background should be avoided I can buy into eye fatigue from the background being mostly arctic white (#FFFFFF) such as a fullscreen Notepad text editor. This can be especially annoying when one has a 31" monitor -- it's like having a giant 31" lightbulb shining into one's eyes. However, I still don't see any evidence that the text color of #000000 causes eye strain. HN'rs... try this: go to "sarahwerner.net" (the webpage of this thread) In Google Chrome press F12 for Inspector Right-click on one of the grey paragraphs and select "Inspect element" In the "Styles" tab, press "+" to add a new css rule The new rule is "p { color : black; }" In Chrome, it lets you use your mouse to click a checkbox to dynamically toggle that rule You should also see that the values properties pane to toggle from "rgb(68,68,68)" to "rgb(0,0,0)" (Modify those instructions for Firefox, Safari, etc.) (Here's an animated gif showing what the F12 experiment looks like: http://i.imgur.com/mmfKIjW.gif http://i.imgur.com/mmfKIjW.gif Keep in mind that GIF demo is 8-bit color not 24-bit so you must do the experiment yourself to get an accurate comparison.) Experiment with toggling back & forth and see if you suffer the "eye strain" when it flips to #000000 that some folks are talking about. Personally, I think #000000 looks more readable because even though the sarahwerner.net's background is #FFFFFF (pure white), it doesn't "feel" like pure white because she has large elements on webpage such as photos and screenshots. My guess is that the eye "averages" out the entire background to be a "light grey" even though the underlying RGB value is pure white.
- exodust 11y ago
  You might be right about #000 on white not causing eye strain any more than grey on white. The grey font on sarahwener.net is more pleasing (to me) because I associate eye fatigue with overly contrasty page environments. Looking again, it really is the Merriweather font I like most about the text. The lighter grey colour is less to do with it. White text on black on the other hand as I mentioned, it causes shimmering. It's hard to speed-read. Harsh white text on pure black will challenge your eyes after a few pages. I've been on the receiving end of user complaints about this very thing. We changed it to off white text and brought the black up slightly and everyone agreed it looked better. As you say, bright white screens are lightbulbs shining in our eyes. Personally, it's the white backgrounds that hurt my eyes both on large monitors and reading web pages at night on my tablet. I even have a greasemonkey script that "fixes" this on some regular sites I visit such as Google. I don't touch my monitor brightness because I need it to be accurate for photoshop etc.
ionelm 11y ago
It's amazing at what lengths people go with the theoretical arguments and personal conjecture. Screens don't really have any black - the black you see is just a dark gray. The screens have limitations ... Even if you'd have a very good screen, very few people go through the trouble of calibrating their monitors. At the same time, no one can point to a scientific study of contrast choices over many types of screens and (mis)calibrations ... PS. Screens are calibrated to ambient light - that compensates for the white being too white kind of problems.

by exodust 11y ago

jasode 11y ago

>Ideally though pure white background should be avoided I can buy into eye fatigue from the background being mostly arctic white (#FFFFFF) such as a fullscreen Notepad text editor. This can be especially annoying when one has a 31" monitor -- it's like having a giant 31" lightbulb shining into one's eyes. However, I still don't see any evidence that the text color of #000000 causes eye strain. HN'rs... try this: go to "sarahwerner.net" (the webpage of this thread) In Google Chrome press F12 for Inspector Right-click on one of the grey paragraphs and select "Inspect element" In the "Styles" tab, press "+" to add a new css rule The new rule is "p { color : black; }" In Chrome, it lets you use your mouse to click a checkbox to dynamically toggle that rule You should also see that the values properties pane to toggle from "rgb(68,68,68)" to "rgb(0,0,0)" (Modify those instructions for Firefox, Safari, etc.) (Here's an animated gif showing what the F12 experiment looks like: http://i.imgur.com/mmfKIjW.gif http://i.imgur.com/mmfKIjW.gif Keep in mind that GIF demo is 8-bit color not 24-bit so you must do the experiment yourself to get an accurate comparison.) Experiment with toggling back & forth and see if you suffer the "eye strain" when it flips to #000000 that some folks are talking about. Personally, I think #000000 looks more readable because even though the sarahwerner.net's background is #FFFFFF (pure white), it doesn't "feel" like pure white because she has large elements on webpage such as photos and screenshots. My guess is that the eye "averages" out the entire background to be a "light grey" even though the underlying RGB value is pure white.

exodust 11y ago
You might be right about #000 on white not causing eye strain any more than grey on white. The grey font on sarahwener.net is more pleasing (to me) because I associate eye fatigue with overly contrasty page environments. Looking again, it really is the Merriweather font I like most about the text. The lighter grey colour is less to do with it. White text on black on the other hand as I mentioned, it causes shimmering. It's hard to speed-read. Harsh white text on pure black will challenge your eyes after a few pages. I've been on the receiving end of user complaints about this very thing. We changed it to off white text and brought the black up slightly and everyone agreed it looked better. As you say, bright white screens are lightbulbs shining in our eyes. Personally, it's the white backgrounds that hurt my eyes both on large monitors and reading web pages at night on my tablet. I even have a greasemonkey script that "fixes" this on some regular sites I visit such as Google. I don't touch my monitor brightness because I need it to be accurate for photoshop etc.

ionelm 11y ago

It's amazing at what lengths people go with the theoretical arguments and personal conjecture. Screens don't really have any black - the black you see is just a dark gray. The screens have limitations ... Even if you'd have a very good screen, very few people go through the trouble of calibrating their monitors. At the same time, no one can point to a scientific study of contrast choices over many types of screens and (mis)calibrations ... PS. Screens are calibrated to ambient light - that compensates for the white being too white kind of problems.