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Contrast Rebellion

contrastrebellion.com

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Re: Contrast Rebellion

#41

Post by amelius »

gumby wrote: post #30
amelius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, all these strange glyphs also don't seem to appear in nature ...

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 disambig…

If true then why are Latin and Arabic glyphs so different?

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#42

Post by mkidd »

This is a huge pet peeve for me. Shouldn't this be a “solved” style problem in 2023! I'd gladly fire every tenth web designer responsible for this problem regardless of their other merits.

Small fonts are one thing. There are browser hot keys to change the font size. And I'm a huge fan of the "Zoom Text Only" option in Firefox where the rest of page doesn't go flying off the edge of my viewing area. But low contrast text is hugely annoying. What are my options? Open the developer tools and tweak the CSS every time? Try to find a good browser extension that solves the problem? Write my own? And some of these solutions are inconvenient or impossible on mobile.

I understand using low contrast text (and small fonts) for tedious but necessary legal disclaimers. But if you use it elsewhere, I'll move on—either you have nothing to say and don't really want people to read the text, have a poor designer, or are generally incompetent.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#43

Post by callesgg »

To hell with webpages that alter scrolling behavior.

But to be fair this page was better than most pages that dare to do it, it was almost not buggy on this page.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#45

Post by gumby »

amelius wrote: post #41
gumby wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disambig…

If true then why are Latin and Arabic glyphs so different?

I wrote “in most languages” specifically thinking of Arabic-derived scripts, but don’t know of any others.

Older scripts, and those descended from other roots, seem to have this property.

Of course in practice Arabic writing is as easy or hard for humans to learn as any other system, so the evolutionary pressure/affordance to get rid of hard parts still applies.

But the theory of early visual system affordance could in principle be studied (though I don’t think fmri is really solid enough yet). Any historical implications of course will always have to remain theoretical.

Writing has technological constraints as well; look at cuneiform vs, say, Pali. Since Arabic evolved after predecessor systems already existed, technological affordances clearly had a, or the, major influence.

Edit: I read your comment again, and just to be clear: your question is really “why is Arabic different”. Latin, Georgian, Aramaic, Brahmic, Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Maya pictographs, all have roughly the same form factor.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#46

Post by NikolaNovak »

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day.

That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background light.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#47

Post by layer8 »

kdazzle wrote: post #22
kentonv wrote: post #20

Weirdly, this site uses `color: #1b1b1b` instead of black. Why? The difference is barely noticeable, but black provides more contrast and IMO looks better than #1b1b1b. I've seen many designers assert that being slightly off-black is "better" for some reason, but isn't this the same argument that eventually leads to low-contrast designs? Why is a little bit of contrast reduction good, but a lot is bad? Pure black alw…

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/

What this argument overlooks is that pure black also isn’t found on computer displays. Even for OLED, black is really dark gray if you have any amount of ambient lighting. Displays are a part of nature in that sense.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#48

Post by JJMcJ »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #46

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

HN has the better choice. If you don't want stark look of black on white, change the background color, not the font color.

Not quite sure what the point of some comments being in lower contrast.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#49

Post by Kwpolska »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #46

I'm always amused by HackerNews being presented as this awful, unreadable, low-contrast atrocity, when it is the most user-friendly, easiest-to-read, most seamlessly customizable thing I access on literally any given day. That being said, yes; awful low-contrast sites exist. But it's not, hah, black and white. There's certainly such a thing as too high of a contrast - depending on the person, monitor, and background…

The default font size on HN is unreadable, and has issues with contrast, especially with downvoted or text posts.

Re: Contrast Rebellion

#50

Post by ComodoHacker »

mkidd wrote: post #42

This is a huge pet peeve for me. Shouldn't this be a “solved” style problem in 2023! I'd gladly fire every tenth web designer responsible for this problem regardless of their other merits. Small fonts are one thing. There are browser hot keys to change the font size. And I'm a huge fan of the "Zoom Text Only" option in Firefox where the rest of page doesn't go flying off the edge of my viewing area. But low contrast…

Dark Reader extension tries to solve this problem. It's primary use case is adding dark mode support, but it can help with contrast too.
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