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Comment by cknight | Hacker News Reader

Something I've been pondering recently: If there is broad acceptance of the research, and sufficient industry agreement to justify programs like f.lux and other night lights, should web developers like myself be more considerate as to what colours we splash over our websites?

I ask this as someone whose most recent project is bathed in a deep blue background, while posting on a site that is comfortably orange.

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> should web developers like myself be more considerate as to what colours we splash over our websites?

Please please don't write grey on white. It's illegible. I have to ctrl+a all the time. Black on white, like most books. Also take into account that the user may disable websites picking their own fonts. I do this because I don't want to download them fonts for no apparent reason and because it's usually illegibly thin type. Thin type + #ddd color only helps in the process of becoming blind.

Off topic: while at it, I wish pages used the first screenful for more meaningful information.

I don't know why this was downvoted. For people that have astigmatism grey on white is not very pleasant for reading.

Your last sentence is not quite off topic. If we didn't have to scroll past so many useless giant stock photos before getting to actual content, we wouldn't need to spend as much time looking at screens :)

Many times colors go with branding, in most cases it wouldn't be possible to change the color according to the user's time.

You could put a switch to enable "night mode" for your website, but if your visitor knows about this problem he'll already have either f.lux installed, or native options enabled.

Yep. And although my own work leaves me with complete creative freedom (I do all the branding), I am looking at Facebook and thinking that the small blue bar at the top is probably subtle enough to not have a big effect on the eyes. Certainly not vs. my site (https://suitocracy.com) which has... uhh, a bit more blue than that.

Looks good.

I don't think that shade of blue is that bad for your eyes. I for instance have a gradient between fuchsia and purple, and it's probably worse.

The problem is not blue parts of the picture, but overall level of blue light, which is coming mostly from white parts of webpages. In particular, the dark blue parts of your page have the blue channel at less than 1/10 as intense as the blue channel in the white parts of your page (remember, the sRGB values are gamma-adjusted).

It’s better to make your design look good (I recommend lots of lightness contrast especially for text, and nothing too outrageously colorful), and leave minimizing blue light exposure to the user/browser/OS.

Not to further add to your workload, but one thing I've noticed a few times is that some already subtle colour schemes become even less usable once f.lux has activated. Verifying usability with f.lux/Night Shift/whatever Android solutions there are is probably the biggest win.

I'd just leave it up to the browser or even the monitor.

> "I'd just leave it up to the browser or even the monitor."

As long as it is is easy to disable said behaviour. Case in Point: My rather fancy and expensive Dell monitors have got a so called intelligent powersave mode where they automatically power down if there is no activity after a period of time. Unfortunately there is no way to disable this "intelligent" behaviour. Also unfortunately this behaviour is buggy (tested on more than 1 Dell monitor). I can be typing, playing a game or just browsing around and bang, monitor powers down. It turns out the underlying cause is the type of connection I am using to the monitor.

It turns out that this "intelligent" powersave is rather dumb, buggy and best of all can't be disabled because why would anyone ever not need this glorious new feature, right? /s

I wondered this the other day while working on a website. On the top of the site there is a header with three words, each a different color. The third word is blue. It looked fine during the day but at night, with flux turned on, I was unable to see the blue text against the black background.

I actually made the decision to paint the header the same color as the body text. No idea how many people will view the site with flux on but since _I_ need to look at it a lot, I figured it was a good change to make.

That's an interesting thought. Related to this, I love Microsoft's Dark Theme (search for "theme" for the selector) on their docs:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/

Personally I think its sufficient to have a low contrast mode on your website.

In general I think its never a bad idea to reduce strain on the eyes of a user, reducing excessive contrast is one way to do it

I'm not a professional web designer Tho.

Since starting to use f.lux, I've had to use custom stylesheets to make some websites usable at night. It's surprising how some features just disappear when you remove the blue.

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