wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Going Dark?
Keith Martin 2007-Mar-18 12:16:00
Sometime around 18/3/07 (at 07:06 +0000) Jakob Norstedt-Moberg said:
>It was a great thing
>when the first terminals and the Mac allowed a white, paperlike
>background. When Windows came, the PC:s also switched to a white
>background. The opinion was that it was much more user friendly and
>easy to read. Was that opinion wrong?
Hi Jakob - no, that wasn't wrong. It is generally less dazzling for
normal-sighted readers to have dark text shown on a light background.
(Although if the display is set to quite a bright level it can be a
bit much with large expanses of white - after all, with printed paper
the light is reflected from the surface but with displays we have the
light pumped out at us.)
But all that is with text in mind. It is generally considered to be
best for photographic presentation to use a mid or slightly dark
neutral grey background rather than a white one (or an entirely black
one) to avoid influencing perceptions of brightness and contrast.
Personally, I didn't have a problem with the previous background -
BUT I do think that this is better, in balance.
I'm not so sure about the pastel-pale text colours in the slightly
lighter grey boxes; the relative contrast is not really that great.
Perhaps a little deeper thought regarding the page design structure
itself might be in order?
(I'm presuming details such as link colour states are not done simply
because this is a demonstration of the general proposed change... :-)
k