Comments on: When Black Is Not Black

By: Brokl

Brokl — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 17:43:20 +0000

Anybody ever told you that your hovered over links have a stinky color? Weel, consider yourself told.

By: LazyJim

LazyJim — Mon, 31 May 2004 02:34:47 +0000

@Jeroen Visser :-) keep going up to my previous post I really hate pure white pages!

By: Sykil

Sykil — Sat, 22 May 2004 00:52:15 +0000

No offense to anybody, but I find this rather idiotic.

Design is generally selfish, and reflects the designers own aesthetic, so why try to force them to change it? And I don’t think they feel at all threatened because you won’t read their blogs because of the contrast between background and text color.

I could agree with you if the arguement were based on something that had a right way and a wrong way of going about it, but there is no set right and wrong text or background color. I think the text in this comments box is too small, but who am I to force you to change that?

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 20 May 2004 03:14:35 +0000

I use #333 with the palest (I mean palest) shade of grey-blue I can find. Looks brilliant.

By: Jeroen Visser

Jeroen Visser — Wed, 19 May 2004 02:46:16 +0000

Hmmmrpf. You hit the ‘post this comment’ button and read within 10 seconds that someone has observed exactly the same as you, just three posts or six days earlier. ;-/

@Al Abut: sorry ’bout that! :-) Join the club, then. Club soda?

By: Jeroen Visser

Jeroen Visser — Tue, 18 May 2004 21:48:11 +0000

It’s odd, to say the least: 30 comments and all focus on the text color when it comes to legibility of online copy.

Instead of promoting #333 text on a white background, it would be much, much better to promote black text on a #CCC or #DDD background. Why’s that? That’s because #FFF as a background color is far more stringent on the eyes than for instance #DDD. (Considering that at most 15% of your web page is actually covered with text, the other 85% would be white to a large extent, right?)

Ever seen a book printed in an 80% halftone on bright white paper? No. Books rely on the paper being off-white to improve legibility. And that’s the result of 400 years of development, experiments and experience.

By: Jake Badger

Jake Badger — Fri, 14 May 2004 08:56:05 +0000

Don’t forget that Macs and PCs have different gamma. So while #666 might look fine under IE 6 on the PC, it’s going to be pretty washed out under Safari on the Mac.

By: Dan Rubin

Dan Rubin — Thu, 13 May 2004 06:34:46 +0000

Just from looking at this site you should be able to judge my personal opinion on color and contrast (though remember, this is a personal site, which allows me to do things that wouldn’t necessarily fly in a commercial application).

As for the small text in the comment area: I’ve been meaning to fix that for ages, so my apologies to anyone who’s had to squint in order to comment here :) The issue appears to be fixed (tested in Safari, Firefox, Mozilla and IE/Win).

By: Al Abut

Al Abut — Thu, 13 May 2004 02:55:41 +0000

Funny no one's mentioned this yet - what about keeping text at #000 and bumping up the background? You can even stay under #ccc if it's too gray and go with something nearly unnoticable like #f5f5f5 (nearly because it'll still soften the text without too many people noticing the difference, if that's you'r thing) or like the comments box on this here page, use a delectable color of a very pale hue instead. And for the trolls that consider a discussion about text contrast below their coolness radar, working web designers understand that this is the whole point of the stuff we put up - making people read our ideas and influencing them. The graphics are there just to shepherd the eyes along. Call me a HTMinimaList, I don't care...

By: LazyJim

LazyJim — Thu, 13 May 2004 02:16:08 +0000

Also black on white (or vise-versa) and many other combinations are very bad.

The amound of black and white is not the only way to create contrast, and too much contrast is a bad thing for human eyes — specially on light emmiting media.