Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Contrasting Vision

In one of my pre­vi­ous posts I encour­aged peo­ple to aban­don #000 as copy text colour in favour of lighter shades such as #333 or even #666, for exam­ple. In ret­ro­spect there are two things wrong with that post. First, I should not tell peo­ple what, or what not to do, even if my words were meant as a some­what ironic, very much tongue-in-cheek state­ment. It is never my inten­tion to com­mu­ni­cate with such an atti­tude. Sec­ond, I wasn’t jok­ing — even if ironic, I was some­what seri­ous. But was I right to make such a statement?

In all hon­esty I think I was wrong, to some degree. I should note that there’s a dif­fer­ence between choices you make as part of your per­sonal web site as opposed to com­mer­cial projects. A per­sonal web site is exactly that: per­sonal. You get what you pay for. The choices you make are yours and I’m cer­tainly not the one that’s going to tell you what to change. Com­mer­cial projects on the other hand need to fol­low best prac­tices, such as good read­abil­ity and suf­fi­cient con­trast (among many other things, of course.)

Receiv­ing one com­ment about a par­tic­u­lar issue is not going to val­i­date a change, per se. How­ever, a sequence of com­plaints reveal­ing that con­trast of body text is insuf­fi­cient, asks for a sim­ple and straight­for­ward solu­tion: increase con­trast, à la minute. As a designer I have noth­ing to gain from stand­ing by my orig­i­nal deci­sion. Design is an iter­a­tive process of trial and error. Ide­ally, you hope to solve all prob­lems and pos­si­ble issues before you launch a web site, but that’s not always pos­si­ble. There’s always a point where you just need to launch, period.

Now, do I really think you should not use #000 as a colour for copy text? Of course not. That said, as a designer I con­sider issues of style. In my opin­ion con­trast and colours are both essen­tial fac­tors of what con­sti­tutes style. Nonethe­less it is impor­tant to find a bal­ance between style and usabil­ity — obvi­ously, con­tent is going to suf­fer if not read­able. For the sake of this dis­cus­sion I’m going to include a quick and dirty user test, ask­ing for your feedback.

Vari­able copy text colour and con­stant back­ground colour (#fff) — exam­ples 1–4
Con­stant copy text colour (#000) and vari­able back­ground colour — exam­ples 5–8

So, what exam­ple (1–8) do you find most read­able, or what exam­ple is not accept­able? State your find­ings in the com­ments, don’t for­get to men­tion the type of mon­i­tor you’re using (CRT, flat­panel, lap­top, etc.) Please realise that this is just a quick assess­ment, I’m not try­ing to con­clude to any­thing per se. Just test­ing for fun and insight. Besides I have abstracted from an assort­ment of other vari­ables and used only raster val­ues of black, but the same prin­ci­ple applies to other colours.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Saturday, May 22nd, 2004.

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• Design

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