Here's a handy tool for checking whether contrast between text and background colors meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0: http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
How the Web Became Unreadable
311–320 of 354 posts
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a designer, I agree completely. The problem is: interaction design really is a discipline in its absolute infancy. It's not graphic design. It's not engineering. It's not architecture. Pretty much anyone can just pick it up and start doing it. And the people who decide to ship shitty designs you're complaining about are more concerned with 'pageviews' or 'installs' (and in turn, their bonus) than actual usability.…
Everything you say might be right, but there is something extra to jonstokes' comment: ametures and nerds often produce more functional sites than real designers. The mechanism here is that whatever esthetic and psychological principles are in play, an interface must also present the needed info and functionality. Craigslist and HN do that in a more-or-less bullshit free way. UX designers can get caught up in other c…
What is called a UX person is often a UI person. Even Adobe's tool "Experience Design" is really UI Design. http://www.adobe.com/products/experience-design.html
If only there was room for a UX person as well. Let them do the 'Sprint 0' before someone even touches a computer.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#313Subjective though it may be, there are a lot of people who find black-on-white unpleasant to look at. I greatly prefer sites that don't use it, regardless of what they do with font and size. This could just be a case of conflicting preferences, but I don't think it has to be. Clear contrasts are achievable without insisting on #000/#FFF web design. - The most obvious improvement is simply keeping an eye on contrast.…
if you find black on white unpleasant to look at that likely means your monitor is too bright.
I think it's more complex than that (although most monitors are too bright).
For pure black on pure white, my 'pleasant' brightness is somewhat lower than my 'easy to read' brightness. I'm reading in a space with high ambient light, and the contrast stays obnoxious until it becomes difficult to use. (I wish E-ink monitors were a thing.)
For something like HN's color scheme, or a strong Flux setting, I can find a comfortable middle ground of readable and relaxing. I'm not sure why, but adding a bit of tan/yellow to the background makes a huge difference for me.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's hard to disagree, but I think the problem is more fundamental: way, way too many people working in tech assume that because Google and Facebook and Apple and Microsoft are huge and financially successful overall, that means they know what they're doing and should be emulated. This has been true in recent years with the trendy but awful design. It's not just the typography. The obsession with flat design and givi…
Eh... I think that's true in part, but I've also met people who really love that flat Metro design. It's hideous in my book, but it's trendy, yes, but that's because some people like it. More so than that, looking at website design from a monetary perspective: It's fast, cheap, and easy. It takes alot less time to put together a sleek modern website that utilizes the flat but nifty new CSS3 features than sitting down…
More so than that, looking at website design from a monetary perspective: It's fast, cheap, and easy.
I'm afraid this is probably the main reason flat design caught on. It's achievable by developers with little design background, and can be implemented with little more than a bit of boilerplate from some CSS framework for a web site or the equivalent in a UI builder for an app. No need to hire anyone with digital artwork skills or experience designing more complicated UIs, and no need to prepare and serve the associated assets as part of your site/app.
Unfortunately, from a usability and accessibility point of view, current trends in design and typography are still objectively awful in various ways, and from a brand distinctiveness point of view, it's still a severely limited style to work within. There's an (actually quite reasonable) argument that a lot of designers and marketers who promote branding aren't generating particularly good returns until you get to large, well established, well known businesses anyway, but the usability and accessibility flaws hurt everyone.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that once you're trying to hide info or functionality it's because you don't know the users workflow. Understanding workflow is the key to usability, at least with LOB apps, trying to cram everyone's needs into a single table or building UI's that are essentially skins over database tables make for some awful UI's.
> cram everyone's needs into a single table or building UI's that are essentially skins over database tables make for some awful UI's ... which, after you learn how to use them, often work much faster than the alternatives. There are anecdotes a-plenty here like our local (tiny) bank who held out replacing their terminal based with their Windows version because in tests the keyboard based, archaic, every-on-one-scree…
Those expert modes went away because invariably newbies would trigger it, freak, and bother tech support.
And frankly the mouse, and more recently touch screens, seems to have made interface designers ignore the value of haptic feedback.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#316Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate? When wasn't it been the case? For the last 20 years I have been doing this it was the case. Before that too. So not sure what you are referring to.
~10 years ago UX was all about adding animations, glow effects and colors as hints to the user. Colors are still used (but much more sparingly) and animations and glow effect have fallen out of fashion.
Not sure what you are talking about.
You sure you are not confusing campaign sites with actual digital tools and resources? It's never been a trend by designers to want to overcomplicate the design. The strive for whitespace runs so deep in most designers that you simple don't get the used car salesman mentality where every little pixel left untouched is one to much.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
I listen to less music in my car because iTunes is such a pain in the butt to listen to your own music on the device. Audible has an acceptable interface so I listen to more audio books. I'm starting to think the people working on iTunes hate music. Never mind replacing the rating I spent years setting with a friggin like button.
Although I think it's trivial to disable Apple Music's service in the app, thereby putting the focus on local content, you should try Ecoute, an alternative iOS music player that shows your music in an easy to understand grid, uses your existing library and is consistent with the play state of the default app so that you can use both apps interchangeably.
Disabling Apple Music doesn't fix the UI. Its truly horrible and uses the space poorly. I thought apps got rejected for duplicating functionality of provided apps? I think I shall try my hand one weekend at doing a classic music player.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#318There is a reason for this. I happen to have an almost brand-new LCD screen here with LED backlight and high resolution, and a low-resultion over-a-decade-old LCD screen. And guess what? A website that looks totally fine on the old one is so blindingly bright on the new one that it hurts. It literally hurts to look at. This can be useful, as it provides a higher dynamic range, which can be used to recreate the blindi…
If it hurts to look at your monitor set to white, turn down the brightness. Get some room lighting so it's not the only light in the place. Stop doing this to yourself, but don't ruin everyone else's readability because your screen is too bright for your conditions.
The issue is that you might want to be able to display both – a darkness so deep that the nightsky looks bright, a brightness so bright that the sun looks dark, and at the same time a white that always looks like a page of a book, and a black that always looks like ink.
As said, it would be best if we had a way to specify colors in specific color spaces.
Then I could make a website that looks consistent no matter how bright the monitor is.
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#319this is perfectly readable: http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
The paragraphs on that page become way too long in a full sized browser window on a 27" display.
maybe this is for you:
Re: How the Web Became Unreadable
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with body{width:600px;} and a viewport setting of, from memory, initial scale 1 and width 600? Works for me on every device.
Or even better, {max-width: 35em;}
I do this on my personal site and it seems to Just Work. I specify a max-width for my content, specify font sizes in em values, and it looks fine on every browser I've ever tried, even a shitty Chinese cellphone (not smartphone).