Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Never use pure black (Hex value: #000000) for text, but instead, a range of grays.

This irritates me greatly. I can understand somewhat the justification against pure white (a poor attempt at compensating for monitors being set by default to insane levels of brightness), but pure black? It doesn't make sense to reduce contrast this way.

View on HN

It's never an absolute, but for a similar justification to the you've given for white — it creates too much contrast, and is therefore most often (especially in print and on bright displays), uncomfortable to look at: "[Pure] black and white create the highest contrast possible".[0]

HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you play around with black text on a white background, you should find that a few HEX notches above #000 (say #333, for example) is much more pleasant to look at.

The abstinence of pure black doesn't irritate me, but taking design advice from IBM does :)

[0] - https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/25356/why-...

> HN's body text is actually pure black (as far as I can tell) and works alright because it's on an orange/grey background, but if you play around with black text on a white background, you should find that a few HEX notches above #000 (say #333, for example) is much more pleasant to look at.

And I immediately tried that. My impression: it miiight be pleasant to look at, subjectively; but it's harder to read, which is the actual purpose of text (most of the time).

Pure black and white don't create too much contrast. I'd like to see some actual research if anyone claims that it does. And there is a contrast button on every monitor to turn it down.

Anecdotally, I find pure black + pure white rather uncomfortable to look at for any long period of time. (Pure white especially, but the combination of the two is particularly bad.)

It wasn't always that way, maybe something to do with my current eyeglass prescription, or just fatigue from staring at monitors all day? I don't know.

But regardless, one of the things I've learned about UI design is not to dismiss other people's concerns about text readability. Just because you have great eyes (for now), doesn't mean everyone else does too. :)

It's better that people that are bothered by white backgrounds dial down the background light on the monitor. Saves energy too!

I agree. I’d rather put it like this: Pure black/white most easily shows if your display brightness is currently set obnoxiously high.

Pure B&W on high brightness is awesome out in broad daylight but of course terrible indoors with lights off and the same display settings.

But is that the fault of the colors?

I don’t have numbers for you, but I do have a theory on why it makes sense. Monitor contrast has been going up for years to provide better photo and video quality. The screens I used in the 90’s couldn’t do black, only a dark shade of gray. In order to achieve the same apparent level of contrast as 20 years ago, you have to use dark gray text. People who’ve been around a while will instinctively do this to achieve an outcome that feels right, and those are the people who produce these guidelines.

>The abstinence of pure black doesn't irritate me, but taking design advice from IBM does :)

It sounds vaguely like an appeal to authority suggesting that IBM is not in a position to give advice. Can you expand on that?

It's not an 'appeal to authority', just a hint that I'm reluctant to take design advice from IBM.

Why? As many other HNers have pointed out, the site that the font is being showcased on is hardly the pinnacle of good web design.

Printing websites with grey text on a laser printer usually gives you dithered and unpleasant to read text.

This should be solved with CSS media queries, e.g.

  @media print { ... }

Whenever I put any of those fancy grayish sites side to side with a printed magazine, the ink on the paper is more black and the paper is more white than what I see on the screen. No wonder paper is easier to read. Then I open the developer tools, set color to black and background to white and the screen is as readable as the paper. It seems that they are missing some basic usability tests.

Paper is always easier to read because the white on your paper doesn't _glow_.

Reflected vs. emitted light.

I'm not convinced that's still a relevant distinction. Looking at the OLED screen on an iPhone X, for example, it can be hard to visually tell the difference between screen and paper.

Still, not everyone is on an OLED screen. Especially on desktops.

Sure, but a good LCD panel is still a lot closer to paper than any CRT ever way. At the lowest level, the state equations of photons don't include a "reflected" versus "emitted" term.

But light diffusion is a common part of analysing what an eye sees. Paper has a much larger scattering effect, whereas something backed by a light does not.

My impression is that grey text sort of looks better on Retina screens. I haven't looked attentively at such screens for more than a quarter of an hour in the past so I wouldn't know. My belief is that most "designers" (whatever that is...) don't look at their creations after letting them go out into the wilderness.

I sometimes imagine making a "designer" read through a long HTML book set in 20pt #ddd-on-#fff Raleway with the lowest weight possible, on a crappy full-brighness laptop screen. He'd be bound to a chair with his eyed forced open and his direction fixed. Maybe then he'd learn to not torment people's eyes.

Professional designers don't care about anything other than the latest Mac hardware. This has been true since the 1990s.

That's because professional designers are neither professional nor designers. How many of that folk actually have had any sorf of education at all on related topics? Graphic design is as old as civilisation and knowing how to do font-family colon Raleway and a bit more doesn't make you a designer. But somehow it gets you jobs, it seems to me.

An art professor instructed me that black pigment paint was to be avoided as it makes the image look flat. Rather, a black-like colour is to be built in layers of darkening shades. I could see this applying to graphic layout with multiple colours, but I'm not sure if it fits for printed type.

> I'm not sure if it fits for printed type.

No, there is no contrast issue with printed type. The problems with displays isn't their high contrast but overall poor ergonomics and usually completely moronic default brightnesses.

I think you might be refering to the changes in object colors due to ambient light. A gray object outside probably has a dark blue shadow. This can apply somewhat to typography, as the color you choose for type should be related to the colors around it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com