Poor Web Page Color Coordination
July 24th, 2005
Am I the only one who absolutely hates web pages with black backgrounds and white or bright-colored text? Perhaps my eyes are really sensitive, but whenever I try to read text on such pages I quickly develop after-images from the contrast that give me a headache. And yet such pages seem to proliferate, increasing rather than decreasing in number.
Maybe it’s that the people who publish pages with such color schemes don’t read their own pages in finished form…
No, I completely agree. I get massive headaches when trying to read sites like that.
Last week I did a mock up of a website and posted it at:
http://www.ustelephone.com/
I specifically did white background and black text for the reasons that you mentioned.
That’s good, but what’s the site for? And you own ustelephone.com? I’d think that’d be a pricey domain.
There are a few cases where black backgrounds can add to overall feeling a site conveys, for example a photo gallery or graphic based site, but as for readability it is truely horrid.
When teaching basic HTML I made a point of how hard these pages are to read as well as using an example problem I had when working at a helpdesk.
I was dealing with a user over the phone who could not print a particular web page, but could print others. After a bit of standard troubleshooting I opened the page on my browser and realized the text was white on a black background.
Most browsers have an option not to print the background color so as to save ink, otherwise a couple of these pages would have probably depleted the ink cartridge.
She was printing on a color printer and therefore it was indeed printing white text on a white page. So I had her copy the text, paste it into Notepad and print away.
What do you eman?.
White on black rocks!
http://www.gourami.com/iprism.php3
=)