@-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") {
    body {
      background-color: #FFFFFF !important;
      color: #000000 !important;
    }
  }

Some people complain about excessive brightness being hard on their eyes. They likely have their monitor brightness set too high. Most monitors can have their brightness set using DDC/CI (this sometimes needs to be enabled from the monitor's OSD). Most Linux distributions include "ddcutil". Install it and give the user who'll run it permissions to access I2C. In Debian, this can be accomplished by adding them to the i2c group.

Find out which I2C buses your monitors are attached too:

  ddcutil detect

  ddcutil --bus=6 setvcp 10 50

Computer screens and paper are not comparable, they're physically different and they're not really even used in the same fashion. Yes, you can read off of both but you get the point.

You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority. Most likely that's not even optimal for you but you've just convinced yourself of that.

I get the frustration you seem to carry towards designers, but if you're blaming _all_ designers because some might utilize anti-patterns or you just have personal preferences that differ, you're kinda missing the woods for the trees.

You do realize that the chair you're sitting on, device you're writing on and building you're (likely) in are all designed by designers.

What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display?

> You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority

BTW, in the CRT days green on black was actually objectively superior if you were using small fonts on most displays. That was because most displays would have slight misalignment of the red, green, and blue, especially near the edges, leading to color fringing around white things. For small text, the fringing could make text blurry and hard to read.

Pure green on black had no red or blue, so no fringing. Red on black or blue on black would have worked too, but most people find those much harder to read than green on black.

Nothing.

OTOH, the spectrum of photons emitted from maximally white and maximally black pixels on an LCD screen is probably nothing like those reflected from black ink or bright white paper under any realistic lighting conditions.

About the photons, you could look into a regular paper sheet's or book page paper's albedo values and compare that to the light emitted from a led display, it's not even in the same ballpark. Why do you think people enjoy reading on an ebook reader rather than a normal tablet with a lcd/led display?

Artificial light strains our eyes way more than normal sunlight (or even indoor lighting) reflecting off of surfaces indirectly lighting everything for us.

Well, none, of course. But the point is that white paper and a display's #FFFFFF probably won't send the same wavelength or number of photons into your eye.

One of them gives me a migraine after 5 minutes. I assume because light being reflected off a sheet of paper gets weaker, though I'm not sure how.

> You do realize that the chair you're sitting on, device you're writing on and building you're (likely) in are all designed by designers.

ANY designer having gone through design school can tell you that low contrast text is a no-non.

So maybe we should just say that the people doing designer jobs without learning about the basics of color, contrast and accessibility are unqualified to do their job in the same way a architect is unqualified if they design streets to small for cars or similar.

Btw. if you have problems with to bright whites (which I increasingly feel is related to OLEDS but that's just a wield guss). Make the background non-white but keep the text black or very close to black.

Also just to be clear I think no on is blaming all designers but just such which do thinks like gray on gray. And then believe it's all okay because their expensive OLED display displays it still kinda readable (again I'm just guessing about OLEDS, I think I have to make sure to get my hands on one to check that).

In the example (yellow on black) I mentioned has too much contrast and actually hinders readability for most people with a normal visual acuity as well as certain types of impairments.

Designers are also the ones responsible _for_ all the accessibility features and standards set to help developers implement accessible solutions.

If you're a software engineer who cares about contrast and studies different vision problems to figure out solutions for example, you're a designer in my book.

This is why I also specifically separated aesthetic and usable design. The former is more akin to "art" as it aims to simply look nice and I don't personally consider it design as design is problem solving and bad design just creates more.

I've always said that if a designer or web developer doesn't actively hinder accessibility, it's already a win in my book. It requires someone to make the decision to slap a #fafafa shaded text o top of a #ffffff background, semantic html and OS default colors go a long way if you don't know better.

That's part of what this article gives you, why it's talking about art school and not technology. Miscommunication - incommensurability of how to see the world really - is the pitfall when engineers are tasked with creating a subjective thing and asked to try to do something simultaneously functional, familiar and original.

Just put yourself in this guys shoes. Just like you are excited to share Linux display color control commands, this guy is excited to share a new way of thinking about black and dark shades that instantly expands your vocabulary - both for creating new things and understanding the decisions of others.

Anyway, the negativity of others in this thread, it's ironic because that's exactly the point of the article, really, that the pedantry gets in the way of being creative - or at the very least, seeing things originally.

I work with an artist daily. I appreciate and value his opinions that there should be no pure black in the creative product we make together. It elevates what we make above all our competitors. It's an extremely insightful perspective.

Design is always a trade off. Do you want more focus on content, or more information with less focus? Is your default setting more friendly to smaller or larger screens? Every person has different preferences, and every trade off has cost benefits you can run. Yet your statement here is very “black and white” (ahem), assuming everyone should think like you. That betrays a lack of nuance in understanding how design works.

In the programming world, you also have these trade offs, yet it’s easier to avoid thinking about them at times. Static vs dynamic languages are full of trade offs like this.

To avoid coming across as yelling at clouds, attempt to frame why it’s a trade off you prefer, rather than a platonic ideal others don’t see (because it isn’t).

It would not be the right choice for a default config, or in a context where sometimes things are scrollable and sometimes they aren’t. (This is often the case on mobile phones; if there’s no scroll bar, the only way to tell if something is scrollable is to try it, if you think to.)

Well, ok, sometimes we do, but...yeah.

and some designs come out of relentless targeting the impact of the bottom line at the expense of aesthetic or "pleasurable to use", some designs come out of snake-oil sales-people, etc etc.

Different populations, different needs/wants/desires/cultural expectations. This is what focused advertising is all about. You can create one interface and say "everyone must use and learn to love this one," and that can work well. You can also gain immediate appeal by creating "one interface for each population of potential users" and relentlessly target your designs for each of those populations. I don't think we've fully recognized it in software engineering circles, but I think a lot of what are producing today is really about creating different experiences for different populations when the core capabilities have been there, available for free or on extremely cheap computing platforms, for anyone to use, for decades.

I imagine that's fundamentally what the job of most software engineers is today: find the design that best matches the needs of the customer, and build a workflow for their needs.

Is this why the most fashionable websites are also the most difficult to read? I ask purely for information.

WCAG2.1 has some great guidelines when it comes to color contrast in digital text and as long as those are adhered to, most people will have a near optimal experience consuming that text.

And yes, too big of a contrast difference is not great either. Just try to throw bright yellow on top of a black background, it's gonna hurt your eyes pretty quick.

So the end result is that Windows users can’t adjust the brightness of their non-laptop monitors without third-party software, or reaching around the side of the screen and fiddling with the infuriating controls of the frustrating OSD interface. So almost no one ever adjusts their screen’s brightness at all, and almost no one of the remainder adjust their screen’s brightness to match conditions. And manufacturers have (understandably) decided that too dim is worse than too bright. So most people’s screens are genuinely painfully bright. So then people say “don’t use actual white” and “don’t use actual black”. And those that have calibrated displays end up sad.

It allows you to change brightness, contrast (and volume, never tried it), from the taskbar.

It works for a Dell and iiyama monitor I own, but not my Agon one, so YMMV

The brightness keys could be managed by BIOS? If you can modify brightness during early boot, or while BIOS settings is showing, then there is a chance Windows doesn’t see those keypresses.

I do wish I could intercept it, not just for external monitors’ sake, but also so I could make it logarithmic or similar, like I did in Arch Linux + i3 with XF86Brightness{Up,Down} mapping and an xbacklight wrapper script. On my Surface Book, the smallest effective brightness change is 2%, and each 2% step between 0% and about 20% has at least as much effect as 40–50% or 80–100%, yet the seemingly-hardcoded behaviour is that the brightness keys just adjust the level by a flat 10%, which is what every platform does (OK, I can actually only directly attest to Android, Ubuntu from some years ago, xbacklight by convention and Windows, but I think the rest do it to), even though such a linear scale is obviously stupid and wrong. On my phone, two millimetres of adjustment on the left has about as much effect as the whole right hand side of the scale (several centimetres).

But if you’re in a normal house in a room that gets plenty of lighting from outside, absolutely. I tend to run my external monitors at 0% in the earlier morning, 20% in the mid-morning, 40% by the afternoon, sometimes up to 70% on a particularly bright summer day, and down to 0% in the evening (and I’d take it towards −20% at times if there was such a thing, their minimum brightness is nowhere near as dim as my laptop’s screen’s minimum brightness, which is even acceptable for use in a completely dark room; their 0% is its 25%, while their 100%s are similar). Leaving them at the 100% they came at would be awful, it’s a little too bright for my situation even in the middle of the day, let alone the evening.

Yup. That would be me. My office is in a basement of my house and has been for the last 20 years.

Is this your opinion or is this widely accepted as fact? I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black or white on an LED display. I'm curious whether there's research that supports either side.

I have seen those suggestions too, but they seem to be just parroted off of each other. I have never seen a single one link to any reasoning or studies that support the claims of better readability. They all seem to say it because someone else said it in a game of design telephone.

In my personal experience, I find gray text on an off-white background to be very difficult and straining to read, and additionally, I don't think it looks good.

I can see some merit in reducing the whiteness and thus brightness of the background, but I don't see why reducing black to some lighter black or gray helps at all. Having text in a nice solid black or near-black with an off-white background seems reasonable to me. That matches more closely with reading things on actual paper, where dark black inks are possible but the background is not pure white. That leaves legibility in place and reduces background brightness.

It's possible this whole "reduce the contrast" thing has gotten off track, when to me at least, the goal seems to be to reduce the blinding background blasting you with light and not to simply reduce contrast.

I so wish I could find that research that once and for all debunked the "UX expert" urban myth that #fff + #000 = evil. It made me consider past mistakes and I go for all black on all white whenever I can. Doesn't hurt from a WCAG perspective.

Rello, Kanvinde, & Baeza-Yates, 2011. Layout Guidelines for Web Text and a Web Service to Improve Accessibility for Dyslexics.

If you suffer from astigmatism you might experience halations or if you have contrast sensitivity, visual distortions.

https://dm-ed.com/info/contrast-sensitivity/

Well, in either case, perhaps nobody should hard-code the darkness of text in their CSS but instead allow the user to set it in their browser?

I agree that the user should have browser defaults that they prefer, but motherfuckingwebsite.com still looks awful in most browsers.

>"I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast" I would say that modern design suggestion often the opposite of usability/ergonomics. On many sites you now often see undecipherable light grey text on white background. It sure is soothing. It also sure is useless as many people who do not have perfect vision are unable to actually read it without blowing text size out of proportion.

https://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-use-pure...

The user can easily change brightness of their screen just as the user can easily change volume of their music. But producers want their creation to stand out. Make their music a little bit louder, or their website a little bit softer than the rest.

In both cases the outcome is a race to the bottom and reduced dynamic range.

And finally, in both cases it's fairly inconsequential. Things get worse but only a little bit.

That this is the top comment and yet no one has refuted it boggles me. I cannot think of anything I've read recently that uses bright white paper. Sometimes I see reams of bright white paper for sale for a few extra $. However if I'm printing a resume, it's on x% linen slightly off white. If I'm reading a book, it's on warm-colored paper. If I'm reading music, it's on even warmer colored paper- and dare I say it as a musician for decades, the stuff on bright white paper (a photocopy, or self-published octavo for example) is the HARDEST to read!

For books, paper isn't the brightest white; it's only copy/printer paper that got in to a ‘horsepower race’ for brightness.

This, absolutely! Monitors usually come with an eye-searingly-bright default that's meant to look good in a showroom and wear out the backlight more quickly, not at all a good brightness/contrast for normal use. I set my monitors to 0 when they were new, and that was already very bright; now, many years later, they've gone up to 20-40 to compensate for backlight degradation, but are otherwise still more than bright enough.

For Mac users, look at https://lunar.fyi/. There are a bunch of other options as well.

For Windows, look at https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian

No need to yell.

Pure black is often not the correct colour for text, unless it’s monokrome (“B&W”) printing, rather than CMYK (but more on that later, because B&W monokrome black is often not “true black” either).

If you are printing CMYK you rarely use key (“K” - black) on its own, but rather use a CMYK mix to build a black shade, to give a rich black (more M) or cooler black (more C) or balanced black - neutral but not stark. The different mix can really change the way a page feels - and the right mix on the right paper (“stock”) can make the black pop or muddy, and have a huge impact on readability. This is really important when you’re designing for print. It really does make the difference between someone continuing to read and chucking your print aside after a paragraph. Good print designers know how to build different blacks for different stock.

When you are printing in monokrome black you are really printing g a shade of grey, to a greater or lesser extent, determined by the absorbency of the paper you are printing on.

And, indeed, different inks have different qualities so some “black” ink for monokrome print maybe be built from various pigments giving it a slight blue sheen or a brownish tint under certain lights. Plus inks - and the paper substrate - are more or less reflective meaning they will behave and appear differently depending on the light conditions.

I loved working in print.

Dark/black background with lighter text doesn’t bother me. White background with black text does.

Are you really going to tell me that I’m wrong for doing what is right for me because of your opinion?

The monitor only goes so low. And this works. Paper is very different to a screen. There’s a reason e-readers exist.

Maybe people should just do whatever they prefer/works better for them instead of insisting that light themes or dark themes are objectively better.

Because of this, for me the biggest benefit of upgrading to a phone with an OLED display was that it enabled me to adjust my phone's brightness without such dramatic loss of contrast and vibrance. Unfortunately I don't think OLED panels will ever become practical for desktop monitors… they're just now becoming somewhat available in laptops and even then sometimes come with issues similar to those seen in early OLED phone screens. We're probably going to have to wait for microLED tech to mature to get this benefit in full sized monitors.

There's far fewer desktop monitors and laptops being shipped than phones or TVs, and the majority of desktop and laptop panel sales are tied up in basic office-grade econoscreens and gaming monitors focused on high refresh rates and low input latency. Midrange/affordable laptop/desktop OLED panels fit neither of these categories and as such haven't received nearly as much investment and R&D.

To only apply the tweak to the dark theme, you can do:

    @-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") {
      body.dark {
        color: #FFFFFF  !important;
        background-color: #000000 !important;
      }
    }

I which they would not, it's annoying when reading outside.

But I'm all in for the darkest blacks.

And yes I agree that if the contrast is to bright it most times you monitor which is generally set to bright.

Hm, maybe one exception might be OLED screens, but reducing the general screen brightness should still work.

If you are still convinced that it's to bright DO NOT make the black not black but make the withe less bright, preferable some subtle bright non gray color like for example hacker news does it.

That makes the contrast less strong without being a accessibility nightmare which requires people to open their web-console and modify your CSS.

The first part is true... yes, obviously shadows aren't black.

But in the real world (including screens and pigments) nothing is black if there's a lighting source somewhere. The #000 on your monitor is just dark gray, because your black pixel is still being lit by nearby pixels, ambient light, etc. And the LCD component (or unlit OLED) isn't perfect black anyways.

Actual good graphic design advice is to aim for a comfortable level of contrast. Not too little, and not too much. Which is why most good websites don't use pure-black-on-pure-white, it's a little too strong.

But another big reason for not using pure black or white for backgrounds is that they allow you to use #000 or #FFF for emphasis highlights that really "pop".

But absolutely none of this has anything to do with #000 being "too black" that's "not natural". That's just utter nonsense.

It would be if that point was made anywhere in the article. Thankfully, it's not.

The article points are : - you are surrounded by black which are actually not black but rather dark grey with a significant amount of color mixed in ; - pure black should be avoided as it tends to overpower other colors in a palette ; - mixing an increasing amount of color to your grey as they get darker will make them softer and feels less dull.

The article literally says: "When you put pure black next to a set of meticulously picked colors, the black overpowers everything else. It stands out because it’s not natural."

Pretty sure that's exactly the point I'm describing. The author literally uses the words "not natural".

And my point is that the author's worries about pure black are irrelevant because #000 isn't pure black either. It's already just dark gray on any real screen, so there's no need to avoid it.

#000 is perfectly natural. It's my unlit laptop screen, which is basically the same color as my black chair, my black printer, etc. So using the idea that "pure black" is unnatural is zero justification for avoiding #000 on screen.

By having a very dark grey with saturation, like they advocate, they can (get close to) a saturated dark color that works with their design scheme, instead of something that is arbitrary based on your environment and that you're actively training your eyes to subtract from the image.

You may be right that #000 is not actually pure black, because of the light reflecting off the laptop screen and other such reasons, but when looking at an image, our brain tends to compensate for these things. It interprets colors based on the surrounding colors in the image. Introducing pure black into a color palette without being thoughtful can throw off the balance and create a color combination that feels "unnatural", since it would be rare to see colors with that sort of contrast side-by-side in nature.

But my point is precisely that this is incorrect, that there is nothing special about #000.

In reality, let's say your other #888 color is giving off 54 units of luminence according to some measure. And maybe your #111 gives off 8 units of luminence and your #000 appears to have 6 units of luminence because of ambient reflection and diffusion. There is nothing special about those 6 units of luminence. You're still far away from 0 units of luminence.

> it would be rare to see colors with that sort of contrast side-by-side in nature.

This is also not correct. Our eyes interpret a gigantic range of contrast. What any screen can produce is a tiny fraction of that. We see far, far, far more contrast side-by-side in nature than we can on any computer screen.

I literally choose my apps on my OLED phone for which ones give me 000 and FFFFFF color schemes. Like this one (Materialistic on Android).

I recently bought a cheap, small LG OLED TV and do not know if I can stand my old 85" top of the line Sony LCD anymore.

I have a 4 year old Alienware OLED laptop, and any future laptop is going to be OLED too.

I personally cannot get enough contrast or a dark enough black for TV or computer or mobile use.

Maybe before presbyopia set in, I would have been more lenient.

That’s the whole point of OLED: each pixel can be completely off. There’s zero difference between a black screen and an off screen (at least visually)

"Perfect black" is something more akin to Vantablack. [1] Which you are not going to encounter in any normal setting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack

I think you'd need to define a sensible range of brightnesses relative to the viewing environment and then the brightness difference between background and foreground (in stops). The latter avoids becoming meaningless with dark backgrounds, because the brightness difference between a few cd/m² (~black on an IPS panel) and 100 cd is about the same as 0/m² cd and 100 cd/m², convesely, it really doesn't matter for perception if the typeface is 2 cd/m² or ~0 cd/m², unlike what the contrast ratio would suggest for some displays.

Second, the contrast is limited to ambient lighting. Whereas the white on computer screens is often far brighter than a sheet of white paper nearby, which is why avoiding extreme contrast is even more important.

Most books aren't "graphic design" -- they're humdrum utilitarian walls of text. Books like graphic novels, textbooks and coffee table books with color graphics are printed on white paper because they can optimize for color fidelity between design and production.

As for print, it depends on the process. Anything that composes colors from CMYK pixels will look ugly and blurry if you do not use pure colors e.g. for fonts at low resolutions or close up. Just compare black fonts and dark brown or grey fonts out of a color laser printer for an example.

So no, only avoid black if it is really black you are avoiding and if it doesn't cause other problems.

To clarify a bit... the #828282 is for some header info like story url domain in (parentheses) next the title, HN user names, relative timestamps, etc.

The main body text of comments which is the majority of content is #000000 total black and because of that, the high contrast makes it very readable. I hope HN never succumbs to fads and copies other websites that think it's stylish to use hard-to-read gray text on white or off-white backgrounds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_black

But not everything needs to look natural. Black text? Just fine. I do a lot of abstract art: Black works well. I'm not going to give up black ink linework any time soon.

I think this more subtle statement is fair advice to beginners in design, who might sometimes make an unreflected choice of black or not be aware that shadows aren't just black.

So in my opinion it's probably bad advice for more experienced artists like you, but it might be very helpful advice for somebody else.

It doesn't take long to explain where such rules came from and the effect they have. He's just parroting an "art rule" that isn't and then explaining some of his own process while acting like it is a hard-and-fast rule. I should mention that this "art rule" is the most commonly repeated "art rule" that folks repeat. I've had this conversation before.

(Seriously, I'm sitting here from the side of helping others people do art when they are a beginner, and have for some years. I've taught a weekend art class for children and have been making art since I was young - I started oil painting before I was 10. I'm over 40 now).

The point is that this is false. In the vast majority of cases, you are not doing purely non-functional visual artwork, usability matters, and naturalness (or pretentions thereof) is undesireable.

“Don’t use the flash on your camera” would be a similar rule of thumb for beginners, even though there’s lots of great flash photography and there are many circumstances where you’d have no picture at all without the flash.

I’d wager 95% of people probably go through their complete lives without ever thinking about how color works in visual media, and I appreciate posts like this one that may crack a few of those nuts.

They both look fantastic on my new matte screen laptop in 2020. That's why updating your assumptions on the regular is a good idea. It's only 8 years later and this is already getting out of date.

I don't know why it says it has a touch screen, but it doesn't have one. The price premium over the 45% NTSC/250 nit version ("Standard") reflects the better light and color, not a touch screen.

The performance is good. I threw 6 Wavetable instances at it in Ableton Live before I admitted defeat. AMD set a new standard with the 2020 mobile chips. The only downside is I haven't had a matte screen in ages and forgot you can see the matte diffuser if you really look for it. But every single color except #FFFFFF is brilliant, and even that is fine. Off-center viewing angles can be a little funky even with the privacy screen off, but it's fine once you get used to it.

Buy another 8GB stick of RAM to fill the second slot to make it dual channel. It opens with a Phillips head screwdriver. HP posts service videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxMMjSF4QFw

2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17334627

2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6581253

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4357002

If you look at the metro design language as used by Windows Phones[0] a few years back, this worked perfectly fine, was pleasant to use, and very gentle on phone batteries.

[0]: Random example: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/63/b6/bd/63b6bd3d59cc3f65782b...

At some point in the early 90s, songs were either soft, or they were loud, and it gave Nirvana a beautiful opening to dial that contrast up to the max.

The moment all our websites become shades of gray, some rebellious designers will buck the trend, create stunning interfaces with pure blacks and bright whites, and the cycle will begin anew.

These sorts of absolute "rules" like "don't use pure black" are silly, of course. We have to have some understanding of the context: Is this a website for marketing purposes, or something which must be read for hours on end? On what kind of screen is this being viewed? (LCD? OLED? E-paper?)

But even if the rules of thumb are silly, they're still important to learn - a good artist has a deep enough understanding of the rules to know when to break them.

Not to mention that staring at a screen that is basically a light bulb pointed at your face is bad for the eyes. Anything that reduces the amount of light you're bombarded with is good.

Sure, it's not trivial to get right, and it should definitely not be used outside backgrounds, but never is a harsh word.

Exactly that's why there is one single wide spread place where black is the default, one place where companies probably could have saved money by using gray but didn't.

And that's text.

Not titles, not headlines or other similar text based constructs but boring continuous text.

Another thing well known to be important about text is readability.

But one companies designer had a wonderful idea to use gray text on gray background and do so at a place which works as a model for other.

And now it's everywhere.

It's annoying, it's exhausting and it's drives me mad.

Luckily the designer of this page knew what he did.

He used dark blue, which has a strong contrast and can be mistaken with black when sleepy.

But you who made low contrast gray on gray a thing, know that I don't like you as you have cause me many troubles ;=)

On Android, many apps actually have three colour themes: light, dark, and black, where dark uses a dark grey background.

I also like how Samsung One UI handles this, where any text is on a frame with a grey background, but everything else has a pure black background. Example here: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/Notebooks/News/_nc3/...

If the Economist lets me read all their articles, but it pink on gray comic sans text, I get a chance to become hooked on their great articles, and a reason to upgrade.

FWIW, physically printing black can be very interesting. "Rich black" includes the other colorants (cyan, magenta, yellow). IIRC double black is having more than one (lithographic) plate with black. Really subtle stuff that you don't notice until something seems wrong.

https://www.prepressure.com/design/basics/rich-black

Then of course there were many partisans of the misc suppliers of black ink, each claiming superiorities.

This is something that worries me about the trend towards dark modes and often complete lack of light mode alternatives (Steam). And as others have mentioned, the complaint about light modes being too bright is often a brightness setting issue and not a design issue.

There was a trend a few years back of using really light text colours on white, that's awful too. We need to respect the rules of contrast before what may "look" appeasing to the designer.

When The Verge came on the scene in 2011, they showed just how pretty the proper use of black can be.

Sure, it's rare to be in such a setting nowadays (at least your cellphone indicating it's charging will be there, or there'd be stars or moon outside), but I think caves are perfectly natural, and you get pure absence of light there. Or 10km below the sea level.

As others have pointed out, you rarely even get pure black, especially with text: on top of reasons others have mentioned, displays use subpixel rendering to make an illusion of higher dpi (similar techniques are employed in the print industry).

Even if we had pure black and white, the real environment of the user would tweak the white balance.

The same design or page, taken from a dark bedroom to an office to bright sunlight will range from unusable through fine (and maybe back again).

So a designer can say #000 against #fff is too high-contrast for some environment, but some users will be in environments where it is not.

Many beautiful things are black. Like a grand piano, or its black keys.

This article is specifically about the blackest black possible on screens.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/aug/21/holed-u...

Website: shows bright gray

User: screams

Black?