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"Words on web pages aren't black". But they should be #000 or close to it. Let the user's screen and environment determine the rest.
Interfaces are artificial constructs designed to be as readable and understandable as possible. Looking at the color of shadows and physically dark things is unhelpful for designing readable interfaces with sufficient contrast.
> But they should be #000 or close to it
You should use moderation. Guidelines for accessibility suggest a 3:1 contrast ratio as the minimum contrast level, but having too much contrast can also make reading more difficult (e.g. for people w/ dislexia)
Not only that (dyslexic) but I see blurry faster if I Read epub whit black and white than Grey and white
I have a design background and have written a lot of CSS, and I have opinions so just interpret this all as a personal preference if you want.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/shadow-palette/
. Play with background colors, you'll see.
> Are you 100% sure the thing you're making #000000 is the absolute darkest thing on your site/app you'll ever need to declare?
What kind of fear mongering is this? :D If I ever feel we should have made something less dark I will just change it. It's not like I signed a deal with the devil which locks me into that particular colour choice.
I understand if you ask a similarly worded question about some choice in a database schema, but colours on a UI? Fleeting like a butterfly.
> * Conversely, never use white! Modern macOS sucks at this! A large window of Mail.app in light mode is pretty blinding. What if you want to add a subtle highlight to a button border on a white background? #fafafa was always a go-to white for me because its easy to remember.
I always thought the grey window backgrounds used by the Classic Mac OS Platinum appearance were great for this. Bright enough to not be dingy and depressing like the more middle-greys used by Win9x, but dark enough to not be blinding, and also dark enough to use actual black for text to maintain high contrast ratios.
Platinum was designed at the height of CRTs, which were considerably brighter and higher contrast compared to the LCDs that followed them — even run of the mill budget CRTs outperformed the average early LCD, and consumer LCDs didn’t really catch up for a good 10-15 years after CRTs went out of style (in some aspects, LCDs are _still_ playing catch-up). I wonder how much the hardware was responsible for shaping screen content design trends.
Device-specific limitations and concerns should be addressed on-device rather than globally.
If a device's white is excessive _then have that device correct for it_. Attempting to treat special or exceptional cases as a general rule, _or even the current primary modality_ leave you with such disasters as presuming all devices will have some fixed maximum display size (320, or 640, or 800, or 1024, or ... pixels), or refresh rates, or palettes ("Web-safe" colours, anyone), etc., etc.
We're working in a digital medium. The domain _we_ can control is the _content_ itself --- text, the source images, audio, etc. _All of those are going to be interpreted and mediated by the devices and tools through which they're accessed._
NB: In my far-more ambitous youth, I'd have said "people can choose their own preferences_. While I'd very much prefer that that capability be preserved, _in the overwhelming majority of cases, people stick with defaults and won't change even the most basic of settings.* This is why _both_ content and UI/UX designers _and_ device manufacturers should ensure that 1) defaults are sane and that 2) automatic adjustments occur and are well-suited to circumstances.
Pixel-perfect presentation is a persistant pox on publishing predicated on ... the Web. (I ran out of Ps....)
I've railed against it for decades.
> Are you 100% sure the thing you're making #000000 is the absolute darkest thing on your site/app you'll ever need to declare?
Assuming you have a well-managed CSS architecture, you could use black for the darkest thing on your site _now_ and change it later if it absolutely becomes necessary! I don't quite follow the logic of not using pure black _now_ because you _might_ need it in the future, since that same argument will apply just as much at that future time! Besides, there are only 256 shades of neutral gray (black #000000 to white #FFFFFF), so even if your "black" background is #333333 one could still argue "Are you 100% sure there won't be more than 50 darker shades of grey on your site you'll ever need to declare?"
if the white is blinding, isn't it because your screen is too bright?
If you force me a reduced contrast, I can't adjust. If you give me black on white, I can always set my screen at a comfortable level for me.
With reduced contrast, you also might force me to increase the brightness of my non OLED screen, which will use draw more power from my battery.
This. People use 100% screen brightness then try to compensate w/ low contrast colours.
I see a lot of colleagues messing with low-contrast color themes for their editors. I use the default Emacs one (black on white), but my screen brightness is always at around 20-30%.
Maybe not blinding but not pleasant. Keeping brightness in check is something I do often but I doubt many people do — notice how bright everyones devices are in public next time you're in a restaurant or theater.
I'm with you that you want high contrast, but you also want balance. I think the #000 on #FFF of this textarea I'm in works because the leading is tight, the kerning is appropriate… its information dense. The NYT website is information dense.
If I squint and I see a grayish blob I feel like good decisions were made. If I still see mostly white then there's work to be done.
I've always been of the opinion that if you find a completely white screen to be blinding or even painful, then you either need to turn down your brightness or add additional ambient light to your room, or both.
Most of the apps text editors etc. I use are in dark mode. So yes, my screen brightness is set to above 50%. When I switch to a white-background page I get instantly blinded.
I much prefer managing my own contrast levels. Always have.
The product of all these attempts to do things for people results in a mess. It's one of those, "if only everyone would..." scenarios. Fact is they just won't.
All that said, leaving some room makes sense. That's likely in the median of the mess and not contributing to it all that much.
macOS doesn't suck at all. It's the device performance being exemplary and people not realizing what that means that sucks.
This site uses white (on the sides). Does that bother you? Seems fine to me.
A colleague who's a CSS wizard was working on a site where a defined colour in SCSS was "black" and it was #333333. He added a darker black at #222222, and then didn't call it "dark_black" and I've never forgiven him.
Could have been blackblack or blacker. Leaves room for the next level to be blackblackblack or blackest.
1) darker_blackblackest vs 2) darkest_blackblack, vote for the one closer to #000, GO!
Blackadder maybe.
What a missed opportunity.
I always make my text black by overriding CSS that makes it some stupid shade of grey.
But "never use black" is a good rule for backgrounds. I worked in military and nuclear UX, and the standards there were pretty clear to not use black backgrounds in software interfaces. Driven by solid human factors research I had always assumed.
Whatever. Why throw away 8% of your monitor's color gamut / dynamic range? Tip to the author, just turn up brightness on the monitor, or shine a desk light on it. Or get a monitor that bleeds some backlight or light from neighboring pixels. Unnaturalness fixed.
It's like saying digitized audio should never have complete silence in it because you rarely hear that in nature. Well, you rarely hear that in the room you're listening in either, or your own inner ear. Doesn't mean you have to add those sounds to the audio.
Funnily most digital audio is never fully silent for a different reason. Noise is added for the least significant bit, because otherwise you can hear artifacts (deemed less attractive than noise) on silent parts that are close to the threshold of the bitdepth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_audio
That's the noise floor, which should be below the threshold of human hearing unless you turn the volume up so high that the loudest signals would be uncomfortably/damagingly loud. 16-bit digital audio has a dynamic range of 96 dB. Even in an extremely well-insulated anechoic chamber where we (unrealistically) assume the ambient noise level is 0 db, you would theoretically hear extremely quiet white noise when playing back a plain old 16-bit CD, but that CD would still be able to blast out 96 dB which in nearly all imaginable circumstances would be louder than desired. In a more realistic scenario wearing well-isolating headphones in a very quiet normal room, the ambient noise level is probably more like 30 dB, and plain old 16-bit audio gives you plenty of dynamic range to perfect reproduce any conceivable digital audio signal for the vast majority of use cases. Certainly for things like music, I think it would be quite rare for a recording to have a dynamic range greater than, say, 60-70 dB.
Dither works for images too, e.g. for cheap displays that only have 5 bits of color depth. It's hardly a problem for audio anymore which is now almost universally 24 bits (and arguably already wasn't an issue at 16..).
> Tip to the author, just turn up brightness on the monitor, or shine a desk light on it. Or get a monitor that bleeds some backlight or light from neighboring pixels. Unnaturalness fixed.
While I agree with your sentiment, none of those are good solutions. Turning up the brightness influences the bright pixels much more than the black pixels (especially on decent displays). The desk light and bleeding backlight sound like a nightmare.
A much better idea would be to change your monitor's calibration (either in the OSD or in the OS settings), or to use a browser extension for color adjustments.
Monitors have contrast setting for this exact same purpose
Honestly, I just find this kind of weird. Unless you had a plasma display in 2012 (or a CRT?) you were using an LCD which have a realistic luminance ratio of ~200:1. Even the good FFS/IPS panels weren't better and the rest of the luminance range was taken up in the backlight... and unless you're in a blacked out basement you have reflection/scatter off the screen, which is already additive.
Most screen gammas are/were roughly square law (sRGB=2.2) above a small linear region below 16 (8bit) so green 0xFF is more than 256x brighter than 0x0F. This has changed with HDR and modern OLED and miniLED backlights that in a perfect environment (not your office) can achieve >1000:1 luminance ratios.
I hate that websites don’t use pure black for text anymore. As someone with an astigmatism, it makes the text much harder to read. I keep finding myself disabling css with inspector tools until the text is back to the user agent’s default of #000 again.
I don't understand the reasoning behind using some "designer black" for large blocks of text. Especially when the background is also chosen to be a softer tone, contrast is reduced even further.
Imagine you're walking outside, trying to read an article with your phone, having trouble reading the text due to bright reflections. After finally managing to maximize your display's brightness, you realize that the website designer has decided to use these "nice" colors. You crouch down, cupping your hands over your phone to educate yourself about how to _never ever_ use #000000 black.
Where you can do so, use your browser's Reader Mode.
It's possible to further tune Reader Mode (using userContent.css) to your personal preferences, though I believe you can also directly set colours, typically to Black-on-White, White-on-Black, or a Sepia (usually dark brown on smokey white) theme.
When using a full-powered desktop, I'll use Stylish to adjust site CSS to my preferences, usually nuking distractions, though also occasionally modifying colour schemes. That's problematic as there are often many elements to change (nuking all but the principle payload has the side benefit of simplifying this problem).
Just use a reader mode / extension that respects your preferences. I honestly have set my iPhone to open all pages in reader mode (and if that doesn't work, I turn it off or whitelist the site).
What a relief to click on this and see it isn't a screed against
Funny too because Ian (author of the posted article) designed the Prettier logo
Thought the same thing. It’s such a godsend, and the first thing I install on every new machine or virtualenv.
he, he, me too. It really transformed the way I program. No more mental cycles devoted to best formatting.
`prettier`, `black`, `go fmt` and other opinionated formatters must have saved tens of thousands of man-hours.
No more fiddling with getting format juuuust right. Save the file and accept the result.
Sometimes it tries to break long lists that better stay horizontal or matrices into long lists, in which case, wrapping the block with `# fmt: on/off` saves the day.
Huh, some of this may have to do with the medium?
Where I've done the most graphic design, offset printing, you get 4 colors (CMYK), and you can pay a little extra to run another plate of a spot color.
In that environment, if you use rich black instead of just K, you'll see registration errors that hurt legibility, especially for small print and at any light/dark boundary. I've got this deep, deep muscle memory of checking the separations to see if we used any accidental rich blacks -- fairly common with advertiser art, but also common in illustrations.
Of course on color pages things are a little different -- looking at the separations, and watching how our photo editors edited levels to make them look good in print, definitely made me think hard about how much hidden detail is in the blue part of an image and how colorful shadows are!
But we were usually on a budget and usually stuck in K. This has for sure colored my design choices, and it's helpful to see the reminder to try designing away from pure black on the screen.
Rich black, for anyone wondering, is when you not only use K (black) pigment, but layer on C, M, and Y, too.
Wow, this threw me back to the early 90s when I did print graphic design.
It's common to use one of the Pantone "rich black" options for spot color, because our eyes see it as "blacker" than 100% K. But yep, if you were doing 4 color work, it was a different kettle of fish.
Now you have a new problem of no one agreeing on a standard saturation level. I'm noticing this more with "dark themes": everyone has a different idea of dark gray.
Since dark themes naturally lead to subduing all other colors except for little accent pieces, the screen is a collage of dark grays to the point that, instead of the background fading away, the background is now stealing the show from everything else. It's this dismal bouquet of gloomy colors and it's hard to focus on the content.
Contrast this (pun!) with terminals and console apps: your terminal is a constant background color while you're working. It doesn't change its shade of gray as you go so it really does stay as a "background" and isn't distracting.
Finally, I feel dark themes exhibit this more than light themes. I feel years of different subtle paper whites has made me less sensitive to variations.
_> everyone has a different idea of dark gray._
There are a few factors causing this:
* People have monitors with different gamma curves, and even if you try to match them slight different output for top white and bottom black. Heck, on bad monitors these things can vary across the screen or if you aren't sitting perfectly head-on.
* People are working in different environments so ambient like that they are seeing the screen against (home & office lighting, light from windows, reflections of those off home/office decor, and so forth) will vary.
* Peoples eyes vary in a considerable number of ways, even ignoring those with variations significant enough to be considered “defects” from the norm.
* These things can all vary over time, over different cycle times.
It doesn't just affect blacks and grays: on a simple dashboard I've created pastel colour backgrounds are used as subtle highlights (used to separate things, guide the eye a little, to indicate status of things (though there are other, less subtle, indicators when this is significant), and to just make it look nicer (as coldly objective as I can sometimes be, even I appreciate a bit of effort there)) that are useful (you miss them if they go) but don't want to be attention grabbing. I've needed to tweak the colours chosen because while they did the job on my screens they were too similar or too almost-not-there-at-all on other people's.
I think the variations are intentional. If I were a designer and looking to match backgrounds, I wouldn't eyeball it. I'd screenshot the target and eyedropper the color - that's independent of panel differences. But maybe I'm old fashioned and not a designer anyway.
"Dark themes" are the new sexy right now and everyone's having a play at making their design palette stand out. I think good usability is taking a back seat to artistic freedom and expression.
Article's CSS:
--black: #113654
Ok, black enough for me. The problem is when you see shit like:
color: #555
(or worse)
On text that's supposed to be dark. Tires your eyes and makes reading anything long painful. But hurrrrr it's not black it's modern!!1.
Nice even hex numbers is a telltale of "designed by engineer".
I design in the CSS and always stick to shades of gray until I get the layout and interactions right, which are easy to reason and conjure off the top of my head. I can always tell `#ccc` is lighter than `#cacaca` but it's not easy tell how luminant a color is just by looking at its hex.
Lately, I've been playing with HSL, which makes the calculations easier, but luminescence is still difficult. Hopefully, LAB color space will be useful in that regard.
As an experiment, I edited the body text to be #000 instead of dark blue and it was instantly easier to read.
Talking about text, as my eyes get older I need more contrast to make things legible. This low-contrast nonsense is anti-accesibility and makes the web harder to read for a lot of the population.
As for artwork, using this for foreground artwork makes things look hazy and over-exposed. Have a look at a good quality black and white print and see how black the blacks are. I want to see real blacks in images.
Since getting OLED displays I've started using more all black themes. Especially at night it helps decrease the amount of light my phone emits significantly (or so it seems).
And OLED screens power consumption is proportional to how much color/white is displayed, so black uses less power. Good for your battery, and the environment too.
In a dark room or outside at night, black on an OLED is truly black and everything else floats magically in the void, it's a wonderful effect.
There is the problem of "OLED smearing"[0] with pure black that makes using it somewhat unviable. It seems that some OLEDs are more susceptible than others, though. Also fairly certain that this only happens with #000.
[0]
https://twitter.com/marcedwards/status/1053519077958803456?l...
I do the same thing. Black background with white text is by far the best contrast setup for reading hands down, it's better than reading paper or e ink. The only thing entering my eyes is the information I want to see, since I started reading this way I cannot purchase a mobile device without OLED.
This is why I use black for the background on my own site, and high-contrast dark themes where available.
Light on black severely hurts readability though.
That depends on the background light in the room. In a dark room, light on black is the most readable.
At night, I can barely see my finger against the empty Feedly screen. Too bad not all applications (looking at you, Strava and MFP) provide an OLED-compatible dark theme and the "Force dark mode" dev setting does not persist after a restart.
Now turn off your monitor! Do you see pure black, or maybe you see the reflection of your room and yourself? #000000 might not be pure black.
This reminds me of some difficulty I've encountered with printing computer images. #000000 often comes out as just-off-black. Computers use RGB while printing uses CMYK, with the K meaning "black". So in some places, like Vistaprint, I would have to specifically set K to a max value to make it look right
Agreed 00000 is not black, but the reflection is not from the backing layer but from the transparent glass.
if the glass’ reflection is greater than the emissivity of the actual screen, isn't the screen black for all purposes? After all, even if you painted the back of a pane of glass with vantablack you would still have a reflection of the glass!
...this is a good point!
I would say it's more of a fashion thing.
Back when many people are still using black, more nuanced coloring would pleasantly stand out because it makes the former look _blunt_.
Now, after the doctrine has taken over the world for quite some years (the article was from 2012), designs like Vercel landing page[0] feel like fresh air to me. I like the aesthetics because it's _clean and straightforward_, and how it communicates in a clear way by punching important information in my face.
There's a certain dynamic behind the game, since what I perceived as _blunt_ before, I perceive as _clean and straightforward_ now.
[0]
I know that this is meant more towards design for digital screens, but I recently learned something interesting about black and gray tints when I was looking for colors to repaint some rooms in my house and ran across full spectrum colors.
The theory behind this is that actual black and gray tints put in paints absorb light and most main stream paint colors use it to tone down colors. It does the job and is less expensive, and will make the color a bit more consistent in all light settings, but the colors tend to be a bit more muddy looking.
This was why the impressionist painters generally didn't use black or gray tints directly. If they wanted a shade that looked black etc. they would combine tints from the ROYGBIV spectrum to create them which is why you see a bit of a vibrance in their paintings.
Now that I've done a few rooms with the full spectrum and can compare you can definitely see the difference. Another fun benefit it that the full spectrum has more nuance depending on the light etc.. It is also why it is impossible to get an accurate color match of expensive full spectrum colors such as those by Farrow and Ball to try to save money with a less expensive paint. One is using several tints, the better ones a minimum of 7 different ones with no black and grey, while the standard paints use 4 (maybe 5).
Along the same lines, Edward Tufte recommends Josef Albers's book _Interaction of Color_, which teaches that there's no absolute colors - it's all relative.
Magazine piece on Albers and his work:
https://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/josef_albers_inter...
Thought you meant the python linter, was already crafting an argument for it before I read your article lol
Windows 10's dark theme basically has this problem: it makes everything #000000 black, which is not most people usually want. It's really tiring to the eyes and I switched back to the light theme instantly.
Windows 10 dark mode is unusable.
I don't understand how anyone can read white on _black_ without their eyes hurting.
When I first tried it out I was instantly taken aback at how MS had used full black for their darkmode. Not suprising, considering their inability to implement reasonable design, but ridiculous nonetheless. I can't fathom how no one on their design team stepped back and thought 'maybe there's a reason dark mode is usually a dark grey instead of black'.
> When I first tried it out I was instantly taken aback at how MS had used full black for their darkmode. Not suprising, considering their inability to implement reasonable design, but ridiculous nonetheless. I can't fathom how no one on their design team stepped back and thought 'maybe there's a reason dark mode is usually a dark grey instead of black'.
It is most likely due to AMOLED and their big investment in mobile technology (Surface, etc.) I imagine a lot of them have AMOLED screens, so a pure-black dark mode pays off here. Nevertheless, I can't imagine it would be hard to just let people choose the colour of the dark variant, like GTK / Qt theming systems do on Linux.
> I imagine a lot of them have AMOLED screens
Not designing for a variety of displays and viewing conditions is frowned upon in general, but should be inconceivable for a company the size of any MS org.
On that note, this is one of the reasons I still use a 1x display as my main. Currently it’s a comically large 43” 4k@1x, so it’s only representative of “normal” usage when I remember to shrink windows, but still.
If anything AMOLED would make it even worse in terms of readability.
The win is it saves on battery life.
White text on black is terrible with LCDs, but with OLED it is wonderful. Imagine dimming your screen just right, the only thing you can see is the text you want to read. It is much more easy on the eyes than even paper or e ink devices IMO, as long as the display isn't turned up too bright.
Most applications look very weird on Windows 10 dark mode, especially some older Win32 apps that were not clearly designed around a dark theme. Windows Explorer looks particularly bad IMHO, it's just too dark and the icons clash badly with those almost pitch black folder backgrounds.
I generally avoid dark themes because 1. they are IMHO very ugly, 2. I find that "night mode" apps like redshift are much better for tired eyes, and 3. I noticed that black themes users often end up keeping a higher screen brightness level than me, which counters IMHO any benefit you may ever gain from night mode.
Speak for yourself. I love it!
Well at least the left explorer windows in a somewhat higher value, so we have that going for us which is nice.
Whenever you’re working with grays, add a bit of color to them and they will feel less dull.
This is such a great advice, and one that's easy to not think about if you are not experienced enough. Just tweaking grayscale colors a bit like that makes a huge difference.
I'm not sure I agree when OP says that shadows are not black though, like sure a road with a whole bunch of stuff around it and some lighting source somewhere can look blue-ish, that's not measuring the color of the shadow though (whatever that means, it's not like shadows are actual physical things), that's measuring the color of the road.
A shadow is not a physical thing, it is the area where the light sources are blocked by objects. Objects in that area are darker but never black due to ambient light from the general environment. If there is only one light source and very little other scattered light from the environment, you can get a very dark shadow that will seem close to black. Situations where the lighting is so extreme are rare and it makes them look unnatural.
_non-black shadows_
That’s cool until it doesn’t match with the lighting in your room. I believe that designers love to work in a complete darkness, otherwise all these shadows start looking very unnatural to the surroundings. We never get the “real” coloring (or contrast, or curves) on our screens, no need to make it worse by adding light sources that aren’t there. You can’t even make two identical part number displays look the same side to side, they’re all different (esp. in 2012).
The text in the article is blue, not dark. Paintings look very off too. Maybe that’s the point, but my light isn’t acid orange to begin with. Also, I feel dizzy by looking at colored shadows that some video bloggers use, it feels like looking at the cheap “white but not really, blinding but not bright” led bulbs.
This is terrible advice for a world with OLED. In an OLED display #000 means the light is off which about as "natural" as you can get.
I really like the crispness of actual black.
Note: the font you're reading right now is #000000.
A lot of blogs over the last decade took this advice too seriously and set up dark grey on light grey color schemes that are really hard to read.
I can see using 08 for general text so that headers and other stand-out bits can be 00. And, I can see using an off-white to tone down a bit from paper-white.
But, monitors in general only cover a tiny bit of the brightness range you are accustomed to in daily life. Pretty much the range from "black paper" to "white paper" in a normal office setting. Certainly not "Vanta Black^(TM)" to "Staring at the Sun". And, 256 steps is only just barely enough to cover that tiny range semi-smoothly. Using that tiny range effectively is a struggle. Restricting yourself to subset of that range is an even bigger challenge.
Except! For backgrounds on powerpoint slides around images. That black on a projector becomes invisible and you're left with just the image, or they just blend with the border of the monitor and you're left with just the image.
That said I rather like black and white for readability. I've even got a chrome extension to be able to read stuff without all the grey on grey, cool but almost can't read it stuff.
80-90% grey background with 10-15% grey foreground (text) is an ideal contrast ratio/color scheme, for me. It doesn't burn my eyes out at night on my panels, in contrast to white-on-black schemes.
During the day, though, black-on-white all the way.
Don't go to far in the other direction. Especially when it comes to text:
https://www.contrastrebellion.com/
The reason outdoor shadows appear blue is obvious in retrospect (think about it for a second if you want to...):
Objects in the sun's shadow are usually lit primarily by the sky and the sky is blue! Maybe this occurs naturally to others, but I never thought about it until it was pointed out to me in a photography article.
Why does the Facebook Mobile interface feel so nice?
_Checks publication date_
Ah.
Past comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6581253
,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24303042
I recall reading this once before, but I quite like full black backgrounds with full white text on them. I think it looks clean and sharp. Even on my IPS monitors.
I've always been annoyed with dark modes using grays instead of black. Thankfully OLED stuff is getting more popular and I can use the setting meant for them on whatever screen I want.
Idk, I really like the contrast against pure black on OLED screens. For some reason it infuriates me on LCD though.
Agree, it's a different thing for OLED displays. Black here can be as pleasant as any other color. I guess it's the same for projectors.
Maybe, but now that I have an OLED, I really want blacks to be truly black.
Very interesting and true.
Reminds me when my mom taught me that in oil paintings the “black” colour of a scene should be made by mixing all the colours used - there is information in “black”. Look closely at an oil painting, you’ll see that “black” has hues of red in it.
Also interesting, in the winter an asphalt road is even less black than typical due to the evaporated salt on it. This is a key way to notice if your tires will have grip on it (if a patch looks black, it could be black ice).
One of the reason I was so disturbed by Github's dark mode when they first introduced it. And I was not the only one [1]. Thankfully, they have tried to address with different shades of dark (`dark dimmed` and `dark high contrast`) since then.
[1]
https://blog.karenying.com/posts/github-darkmode-sucks
From Fast Show to artistic advice: I shall have to get the black out.
I just don't know, "never" is a big word. Black can be useful in kind of an absolute, floating in space, NOTHING IS HERE fashion.
This 2012 advice has aged poorly, and as with all absolutes, fails to consider context, capabilities, and functional goals.
In the specific case of e-ink, where colour is usually nonexistent (there are some colour devices, these are the exception and have limited rendering), where greyscales are limited (16 shades on high-end devices, and often less), and total foreground/background contrast is limited (restricted more by the dark "white" than the light "black"), the advice to avoid saturated blacks is quite poor.
This is most applicable to text, where the most frustrating experience is reading a greyed-out or coloured text, often on a shaded background. Firefox's Reader Mode is a lifesaver, as is the EInkBro browser. _High-contrast text and black-on-white themes are strongly preferred._ Ironically, I use the Dark Reader extension to force _light_ themes on numerous websites. The fact that the extension itself features a dark theme for its controls is ... unfortunate.
Generally for e-ink, I'd suggest:
- Use solid blacks and high-contrast whites where possible. This should _always_ be the case for text if at all possible. Reversed white-on-black should be reserved for controls and emphasis.
- Line art and etchings render wonderfully. There's a reason Onyx features these in its marketing and screensavers, they look truly delicious on the devices. See for example:
https://blog.the-ebook-reader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03...
and
https://www.e-readerweb.nl/test/data/articles/images/lightbo...
- For photographic and shaded images, halftoned or dithered images are an improvement over shading which is at best posterised. The high DPI (200--300 on most screens) achieves near-photographic quality at a modest viewing distance.
- For icons and UI elements, line- and solid-block art is much clearer and more distinctive than shaded or coloured elements. The top four lines of icons in this image are Onyx-provided applications, the lower rows are third-party apps. Onyx's icons are much better suited to the device:
https://sm.pcmag.com/t/pcmag_au/review/o/onyx-boox-/onyx-boo...
- Yes, there are some colour devices available. They're the minority, saturation is limited, and hue fidelity varies markedly from original art. See:
https://www.liseuses.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/onyx-boo...
Keep in mind that _all_ display systems offer limited ranges of darkness, intensity, hue range, and saturation, and that their _best_ capabilities can be severely degraded depending on viewing conditions. Emissive displays achieve their best results under dark ambient conditions, and become difficult or impossible to read under bright light or sunlight, whilst e-ink devices shine (or more accurately, _reflect_) at their brightest under direct sunlight.
Your screen probably can't display black anyway.
When I did (pre-GCSE) art at school I remember the teacher saying that shadows look like the opposite (yes, I can't remember on what axis!) colour to the light casting them.
And suddently, OLED screens become useless
What’s the actual research on reading performance with various colour schemes on relatively modern screens?
For me, it helped to stay away from RGB and CMYK.
HSL and the like delivered better results.
And we have to live with the consequences of this advice today. People misinterpreted it in all possible ways, often by using gray instead of black - which might be nice for some, but is terrible fore readability. Fortunately we have the reader mode so I can ignore their design choices.
(2012)
