Contrast Rebellion

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/

With all the AI we have these days, why can't browsers have auto-contrast?

It's funny, because I've never really thought hard about this, but I made a similar decision on my personal site.

My site has a "dark mode" style theme - dark background and "white" text.

When I was initially designing the theme, I opted for a slightly-less-white text color, and as I've spent more time on it, I ended up bumping that color to be closer to pure white. (I'm using Tailwind, so this change amounted to "text-neutral-400" -> "text-neutral-300".)

I think I did this because the "more white" color seemed... sharper (very insightful, I know)? Like it was "an assault on the eye" to have the color be so bright. As I continued working on the site, I decided, in short, that that was stupid, and that I should have more contrast.

This was a good reminder for me that some of my pages need that styling updated, but it works out well for demonstrating the difference:

This page has the old, less contrasting color for the body text (text-neutral-400): https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-03-07-how-i-built-this-si...

This page has the new, "whiter" color (text-neutral-300): https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-04-05-svg-circle-of-fifth...

After skimming through these again as I linked them in this post, I think I could even bump it up to be even closer to white.

I also have a pretty bright monitor (it's an Apple Thunderbolt Display that I got for a pittance from my old office when they switched to Dell monitors). So that may be influencing me towards slightly less contrast.

Anyway, not to ramble, but I guess my point is - design is hard! It's not easy to take into account all the myriad different factors that need to be considered to make designs that look aesthetically pleasing while maintaining readability at various brightnesses and screen sizes and so on and so forth.

Edit: One other consideration - I wanted some color contrast between elements like text, headings, and the post date - so that's another thing I was trying to take into account. For example, if you want your headings to be a bit brighter than your text, you're left using (for example) text-neutral-200 for headings and text-neutral-300 for text. Again, as I continued tweaking, I realized that the size difference between headings and text does enough work establishing contrast that this was unnecessary - but it's just one more factor in a long list of things a designer has to think about to make things look right.

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There 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”