Ask HN: The UX reasoning for grey on white? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: The UX reasoning for grey on white?

2 pointsxook3 comments

I seem to run into more and more websites going the route of "white background with [light] grey text" these days. Personal blogs, project pages, informational sites and so on. Some of them get posted here, and occasionally I see a few comments mentioning it, as well.

It isn't much of a problem in a well-lit room, of course, but I am also not a fan of having so much lighting in my house that I can use it to help aircraft land when I am reading a summary. Usually I read the page with a dark theme in my browser's reader view or curl it into my term.

Given all of this, I have the following questions:

* Who - or what - started this UX trend?

* Is it really an issue, or just myself plus a small set of others?

Edit: As clarification, I am not the type of person to leave on all the lights (including overhead) in a room where my computer is. I prefer either eye-level or softer lighting. So even with a screen at reduced brightness, I find it difficult and physically straining to read with this particular colour scheme. It is why I use dark grey with a lighter text where I can.

It makes the designer's life more interesting and I've come to the conclusion that that's behind a lot of what creative people make. I mean, the websites for dentists problem was mostly solved by 1997, and if not, certainly by the time Rails 3 came out.

By 'solved' I don't mean that every dentist had a website that did everything the dentist needed and wanted. I mean that there were well established recipes for making websites that could be applied to dentists. In such a world, just as most of what separates one cook from another is which spices they use and how long they leave the meat on the grill and at what temperature, what separates one design from another is pretty much a matter of personal taste and what is more intellectually interesting than the functional details of dentist websites (which don't really change) is following the latest trends in website design which by definition are always changing.

Design is fun and rewarding work, but as a business it is mostly formulaic and the part that isn't formulaic can be argued over and arguing tends to be more interesting than following formulas.

Anyway, this is intended as a first draft version of something I've been thinking about and not really so much as an answer to your question. But the answer is: because designers are bored.

You don't seem to have actually explained what's wrong with that color scheme...

I have added clarification to the post.

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