Discussion from last time around: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047
It has been 4 years. Has the rebellion made gains?
Contrast Rebellion
21–30 of 74 posts
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good rule for contrast: If you would refer to the text color and background color by the same word, that's not enough contrast. Compare the good contrast examples, largely black on white or white on black, with the bad examples, universally gray on gray (or off-white on off-white).
So, the fewer words you know to refer to colors, the more contrast matters to you? :)
You might be right! I am colorblind, and for example I can't see the red component of violet, so most "violet" is just "blue" to me. Purple, too: I have trouble distinguishing the blue in purple, so a lot of purple simply looks "red". If it were up to me, there wouldn't be a word for violet, because it doesn't exist.
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#23I got a radical idea: do not touch the body text/background colors and let user agent/browser pick the colors according to users preferences.
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#24People should filter colors and fonts the same way they filter ads. Its easy.
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#25They may have gotten the contrast thing right but they totally messed up on the fonts. I rarely comment on style because I think the substance is what we should focus on but for a site that goes out of its way to criticize one particular design parameter I don't get how they could mess up so badly on another. That's just ugly.
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#26I have something in the same spirit: http://unreadable.website
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#27I got a radical idea: do not touch the body text/background colors and let user agent/browser pick the colors according to users preferences.
Hah, good one. This is the Internet we deserve, not the one we need.
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good rule for contrast: If you would refer to the text color and background color by the same word, that's not enough contrast. Compare the good contrast examples, largely black on white or white on black, with the bad examples, universally gray on gray (or off-white on off-white).
So, the fewer words you know to refer to colors, the more contrast matters to you? :)
Absolutely correct.
It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. You can refer to the Himba color experiment for more information : http://www.vidipedia.org/vidipedia-the-video-encyclopedia/vi...
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#29Web design was perfected in 1454 when Gutenberg typeset his Bibles with dark black text on light colored paper (also: with narrow, full-justified columns). Deviation from that is abusive to your readers and an affront to common decency.
Certainly publishers could have adopted the "gray on gray" fad at any intervening time, and saved money doing so (diluting the ink, no optical brighteners or bleaching on the paper), but they didn't.
Only in the era of the web has deliberate illegibility somehow become trendy.
Re: Contrast Rebellion
#30Well, what I'm to say here… If you are site owner and you feel that colors hurt conversion/number of visitors/time spent on page/whatever else you care about — you probably should change the colors. If you are a visitor and you feel that colors of the site you'd like to use discourage you to do so — you probably need to help yourself and make a custom CSS of your own (using Stylish or something) to satisfy your very unique needs or just use one of many services like http://readable.tastefulwords.com/ .
Anything else: rebel all you want, nobody fucking cares.
My personal humble opinion, btw: the "unreadable" examples are much more readable and easier on the eyes, than eye-burning "readable" ones. So I could as well go around rebelling about white on black or black on white, but I won't, because it's stupid, I follow my own advices and use Pocketbook for long reads anyway.