No, that's the whole point of the article! Pure black text on a pure white blackground is too much contrast, which is uncomfortable for the eye over a long period of time. It's bad for readability.
Use dark gray on white, or black on light gray, but don't use pure black on pure white. It's too much.
Remember, the contrast between white and black on computer monitors is greater than on the printed page, because computer-monitor white is brighter than a page usually.
The printed page only achieves this level of high-contrast when you're in broad daylight, like on the beach. And of course, most people wear sunglasses in that case, because it's too much.
(Of course, there are exceptions to every graphic design "rule", but avoiding pure black text on a pure white background is pretty standard one for webpages.)
The risk when using grays instead of black and white is that what looks perfectly readable on the writer's monitor may not look good at all on the reader's. The more you rely on midtones, including grayscale-based design choices, the more you are at the mercy of the end user's probably-completely-screwed-up monitor.
Many of us who use multiple monitors on our PCs are all too familiar with how hard it is to achieve consistency when dragging a window between displays. Every time I swap out a monitor on my main PC, it usually takes me about an hour of screwing around with the Nvidia control panel before I'm satisfied with the match between my new monitor and the existing one(s). I'd guess that most users with only a single monitor aren't even aware that they can change the brightness, contrast, and gamma of individual RGB components.
What that means is that spending hours tweaking your design for "just the right contrast" is guaranteed to be a waste of time. Web designers working in the real world need to make conservative choices, and that means higher contrast is almost always better than lower.
Even with good monitors, some of us are tired of the trendiness of greyscale designs and see them as just as dated as it is using green text on black to suggest 'hacker'.
Oh can we please bring back the green-on-black? I VASTLY prefer it to the greyish-on-greyish! :)
But now I wonder, green-on-black is of course based on the old CRT monitors. But in those days you also had orange-on-black monitors, is there any reason why that never caught on in hacker circles?
Or was the green-on-black just that much more ubiquitous. I gotta admit, I did write my first code on a classic green-on-black display ... but friends of me had different models of computers and just as many were orange-on-black (or very early colour models and of course TV monitors).
Absolutely. Too much contrast is bad for long-term readability, but too little contrast is bad for short-term readability!
Finding the right level of contrast is just as important as finding the right font size, the right width for your text column, the right typeface, etc...
What we need is a javascript library that slowly lightens the text over time :P Starts off black and moves to lighter shades the longer you're reading the page.
I'm only kidding, but it would be sorta interesting.
those tools are really nice, it's just that I use graphics programs and other tools that really benefit from an accurate depiction of colour way too often. even websites that talk about colours. for instance I'd have to disable flux before I can trust the colours in the images of this particular article, right?
and flux had like what, three configuration sliders or so? this redshift program seems better because at least it's scriptable in its "one-shot" modus.
I don't know how, but it would be great if someone could come up with a tool that does for your eyes what Flux does, but on the other hand doesn't muck up applications and instances that really do benefit from an accurate depiction of colour. If someone is looking for a "problem that needs solving", here it is :)
Remember that you can arbitrarily tweak contrast with monitor and ambient light -- I'm reading tons of science papers which are always black-on-white and few minutes spent on setup made reading a pleasure. IMO the real problem is that the default setting in most devices is a mixture of inhumane brightness and grotesque oversaturation -- thus designers try to fix a virtual problem hurting people with a proper setup.
There's another reason that good design rarely uses the full range of contrast in any part -- because occasionally you want to go outside the normal contrast range for additional graphical "meaning".
So if your webpage is a light gray background with black text, you can still go even brighter in specific areas. For example, you gain the extra ability to use white to give a call-to-action an extra "pop", or to delineate page sections, etc.
If your page is black text on a white background, then you can never go outside of that, so your functional design vocabulary becomes more limited.
> Pure black text on a pure white blackground is too much contrast
As a mac and windows user, I find this correlates heavily to the OS being used as the font rendering is very different. Black on white is very readable on windows, it looks like hell on a mac.
I used linux and windows as my primary OS's for a long time and recently picked up a macbook air. I thought there was something wrong with it for a fews hours due to how 'blurry' the font rendering was and I still have the hinting turned down. I'll give you that its "prettier", but easier to read.....no.....
And this is all the reason why hacker news has a slightly orange tinted background behind the actual content instead of just leaving it pure white like the background behind that.
Your monitor must be set at ridiculously hight brightness and low contrast, or you're just being obnoxious. I'd make text a tad dark, but it's not hard to read at all as it is.
I found the linked article almost impossible to read on a ThinkPad T420 running Ubuntu due to incredibly light-colored text. Luckily I have the Plain Clothes Chrome extension which allowed me to force the text to black on white.
I must be in the minority, since I see many sites with light grey text, but I find it very unusable.
I'm not being obnoxious and my monitors are usually dimmed because it's easier on the eyes. But I really have to strain them to read some of the more pretentiously designed sites.
I wonder why books are printed with black ink. Is it because publishers have bad designers? Or because the text is more legible that way?
There's actually a difference there, though: books aren't a light source. When you're reading a book, you're reading it with indirect/reflected lighting. This really does make a difference with respect to eye fatigue. And, for that matter, think about the difference between reading in your living room with nice ambient lighting and trying to read the same book in bright sunshine in midday. The "white level" is much higher in sunshine but the black level remains about the same -- in other words, there's much higher contrast -- and it's harder to read.
It's certainly possible to go overboard with low contrast on web pages, but most of the research I've read suggests that there's a happy medium. What you want to aim for, IIRC, is around a 50-70 point difference in lightness on the LAB color scale between the main background and main body text, at least if you expect to be throwing article-length text at people rather than Twitter-length text.
Black ink is far from black. Your monitor's black is also far from pitch black, but the whites are much brighter than paper (emitted vs reflected light), leading to huge contrast.
What designers are trying to achieve by setting text to #333 and background to #f9f9f9 is exactly making screen contrast more like a book.
By lowering your screen brightness/contrast an unusual amount, you're solving the problem for all sites doing it wrong, but turning the ones who use proper contrast into crap. Who's to blame?
> Remember, the contrast between white and black on computer monitors is greater than on the printed page, because computer-monitor white is brighter than a page usually.
Only if the lights are off in the room.
There may be such a thing as too much contrast. I haven't encountered it. But it doesn't make the text completely unreadable the way too little contrast does. When I copy+paste the text of a website into a text editor, it's always because the contrast was too low.
Plus some colors aren't readable on pure black. Dark blue or dark red, for instance, are very difficult to read on a pure black background. (I used to use a pure black background for my terminal windows and switched it to a dark gray for this reason).
Use dark gray on white, or black on light gray, but don't use pure black on pure white. It's too much.
Remember, the contrast between white and black on computer monitors is greater than on the printed page, because computer-monitor white is brighter than a page usually.
The printed page only achieves this level of high-contrast when you're in broad daylight, like on the beach. And of course, most people wear sunglasses in that case, because it's too much.
(Of course, there are exceptions to every graphic design "rule", but avoiding pure black text on a pure white background is pretty standard one for webpages.)