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The world wide web in black and white

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Re: The world wide web in black and white

#41

Post by tomjen3 »

navs wrote: post #22
motdiem wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks - this strangely makes using the computer a more soothing experience. Tried it for a few minutes, when I turned the color back on, it seemed suddenly very loud.

I don't know. I have trouble reading text on these white backgrounds. More now than ever before. This might be the dumbest question but is there a system performance benefit in using grayscale?

It is not a dumb question, but the answer is almost certainly not.

It wouldn't be that difficult to design a computer to process graphics a lot faster in greyscale (you need to use one byte for the color and one for the alpha) since each pixel requires less computation.

In practice if your graphic card only worked in greyscale, it wouldn't be worth the cost of development and so nobody would do it.

Re: The world wide web in black and white

#43

Post by jere »

capex wrote: post #27

Combine this with F.lux, which adapts your display according to the time of day (at night you'll find your monitor quite pleasant to look at). http://stereopsis.com/flux/

F.lux changes the "color temperature" only, so I imagine there would be no perceptible difference when dealing in greyscale.

Re: The world wide web in black and white

#44

Post by hollerith »

jere wrote: post #43
capex wrote: post #27

Combine this with F.lux, which adapts your display according to the time of day (at night you'll find your monitor quite pleasant to look at). http://stereopsis.com/flux/

F.lux changes the "color temperature" only, so I imagine there would be no perceptible difference when dealing in greyscale.

>I imagine there would be no perceptible difference when dealing in greyscale.

Not so: changing the color temperature changes how white looks.

It's night, so F.lux has lowered the temperature of my Mac, and if I hold my iPad up in front of my Mac's display white on the Mac look distinctly red-tinged compared to white on the iPad.

Re: The world wide web in black and white

#45

Post by jere »

hollerith wrote: post #44
jere wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

F.lux changes the "color temperature" only, so I imagine there would be no perceptible difference when dealing in greyscale.

>I imagine there would be no perceptible difference when dealing in greyscale. Not so: changing the color temperature changes how white looks. It's night, so F.lux has lowered the temperature of my Mac, and if I hold my iPad up in front of my Mac's display white on the Mac look distinctly red-tinged compared to white on the iPad.

Damn, you're right. I also just tested it (a better test is to hit the "24 hour preview", though I must warn you it is overwhelming).

I was figuring it would only change the hue, but in retrospect that doesn't make any sense. It wouldn't do a lot of good since a great deal of websites/apps use white heavily.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Re: The world wide web in black and white

#46

Post by malandrew »

TranceMan wrote: post #9

As part of the LinkedIn design process, mock ups are made of new layouts in black and white. This forces people to test and comment on the functionality rather than simple aesthetics.

It actually forces something even more fundamental. In the HSV colorspace, a black and white image has no hue or saturation, only value. Since value is the main contributor to contrast it is the color dimension that contributes most to usability, comprehension and attention.
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