— A writer, a weblog, her opinions: Yourish.com does a good and proper rant about reverse text blogs:
There is a really good reason why reverse type is not used in the print industry except as captions, pullquotes, and short bits of text: It is unreadable in the longer form.
This has been one of my favorite hobby horses for years: so many website designers seem to strive for unreadable sites. Coming from a typesetting background like Yourish (and yours truly), this is abomination.
Strive to set your blog apart with content, not with insane graphics (unless, like Laurence Simon, your insane graphics are part of your charm.)
There’s a difference with on-screen versus print typography, though. Reverse text — by which I assume you mean, say, light text on dark background — is what all terminals used to be, and it was easier to read than the black-on-white.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fonts themselves, and how much anti-aliasing there is. In general, most serif fonts don’t seem to work well for long reads on-screen, and are especially bad light-on-dark. (And as for serifs in general — yes, I plan to change my blog to sans serif Real Soon Now.)
I don’t believe that green screens were easier to read than today’s RGB monitors; they were cheaper and easier to build, because green phosphor is cheap, and they only needed one gun. We quit using them because the ones we have now are better.
The two physical principles that make text easy to read are essentailly the equivalents of brightness and contrast on a monitor – where there is low contrast between text and background, it’s hard to read, and where the overall brightness of the screen is too low, it’s hard to read.
In principle, you can make a readable screen that uses light text on a dark background, but when you click to a black-on-white site from a white-on-black (or neon green on black, which some folks seem to love), you eyes are shocked by the sudden increase in brightness.
So the viewing experience would be greatly enhanced if all web sites used a common convention for text/background colors, or at least some limited set of variations on a common convention.
With a few notable exceptions, the sites I’ve encountered that use white-on-black or some variation thereon have content that’s not worth reading, so I tend to concur with the designers’ judgment that the text is less imporant than the pictures.
Can’t disagree with you on these comments. I agree that it’s the change in brightness (going from white-on-black to black-on-white, for example) that is sometimes disconcerting.
Typography on screen is different in many ways as typography on paper, though, in part because of the different resolution in the media, and in part because of the nature of color on-line versus in print. (There’s a reason why blues are often used in TV graphics, for example.)
Still, you (and Yourish) are right. There’s a lot of poorly designed stuff on the web.
Man, that second paragraph of mine in that previous comment needs an edit. Oh, well.
By the way, I am having major problems viewing your site, as of about 2 weeks ago, using IE5 on Mac OS X. No problem before that, and no problem now with Mozilla 1 or Opera. The RoboPundit box takes up a whole screen, and I have to scroll to the right to see the very narrow postings of yours. No other site gives me this problem.
Two weeks ago I put the column width specifiers in the template instead of the style sheet, trying to make the blog more presentable to NS 4.7. It didn’t work, so I’ve put them back the way they were. Please tell me if this is better for you.
I’ve always been partial to white-on-black. Reminds me of the chalkboards and terminals of yore, evem though these days it’s dry-erase black-on-whiteboard. Sure, I used to have a horrific green-on-circuitboard, but that was a statement in itself. Not sure what it was, but I decided to change my goal of making eyes bleed to making brains bleed.
(And I think it’s working!)
I changed my blog page because I was getting a headache from reading the black on white text. Every once in a while I do that. Gotta keep people on their toes! ;D
I find it also helps, in the case of light text on a dark background, to make the background one shade up from black (or so), or else, if you use black, make the text a very light grey. Use at least 12 pt fonts too, and one of the common for-computers fonts like Georgia or Verdana. (_Don’t_ use Garamond or Arial Narrow at 10pts, no no no no.)
I’ll probably get bored with the Halloween look soon. I’m like that. (I also made my archives black text against white so’s you all can print out my Words of Wisdom.)
Much better now, Richard. Thanks.
Chicks get their hair done when they feel bored and stuck in a rut; now they makeover their blogs too. Dudes have a totally different approach to stuff like that, and all of this mightbe potentially bloggable someday,
I find black on white to be a bit blinding, which is why I use a pale yellow background for content. So far, I haven’t had any complaints (especially since I stopped using absolute font size to make things look better in NS4).
I’ll admit to having the female redecorating urge — but is seems some of the guys do the same (Daily Pundit, for instance). Except they hire a woman to do it for them…
By the way, one thing I usually do when it’s a really BAD color scheme is Control-A to select everything. Highlighting text usually reverses the color. So, if you’re really really particular about black-on-white and somebody has white-on-black, it reverses it.
I’ve done that. Once I came upon a web page that was _dark_ green text on black. (Turned out to have been written by a teenager fancying themselves a “nihilist” or something, what a surprise.)