Design for Hackers: Why Monet Never Used Black, & Why You Shouldn't Either

But with all that said, this was another lifetime ago for me. I've been a programmer for over a decade now and haven't seriously painted in about that much time, so I'm not the expert I wish I was anymore. I should get back into it.

It also depends on the painter. Monet was all about exploring light and understanding light. For him the colors he chose were vital as was his ability to mix color, so oil paint was the natural choice for him. But take Lichtenstein, color was very secondary to his message and he even wanted bad color in a lot of ways. He painted in pure black pigment all the time, he even used acrylic paint which Monet would have scoffed at. I don't think anyone would try to suggest Lichtenstein was less of an artist, just his needs/message were different. When I first posted here and said "fine painter", I was refering to painters where the paint and pigments themselves are vital to their message, like Monet.

Because painting is a subtractive medium, one can obtain nearly the same level of darkness using other dark pigments in combination. An "old masters" chiaroscuro typically uses burnt umber plus a warm blue, such as aquamarine, for the great lake of "blackness" from which everything else emerges. Each of those pigments alone prevents the reflection of a rather broad segment of the spectrum, and together they approach true blackness. That, then, allows the artist to manage the transition out of darkness into either a warm or cool tone smoothly by decreasing the amount of the unneeded tone before lightening.

Painters who use the Impressionist pallette will never go anywhere near that level of darkness -- their shadows will generally be just below a mid tone using the main colour of the object, cobalt or aquamarine blue, depending on the warmth or coolness of the main tone, and the complementary colour of the main tone, all in juxtaposition rather than as a mixture. The apparent darkness comes from contrast. The same principle, though, is used to create shadows in classical painting techniques (but with mixture) -- a darker version of the main tone plus the complement and often a touch of blue.

These rules apply to oil painting. Pure pigments in oil are darker out of the tube than you might imagine due to the optical properties of the oil (which is why white paints are sold in huge tubes). In a medium like soft pastels, which doesn't encapsulate the pigment in a continuous film of a binding medium, blacks are used to create the bottom end of the spectrum out of necessity. Even then, though, a pure black is almost never used.

http://www.amazon.com/New-Drawing-Right-Side-Brain/dp/087477...

I can draw mockups, even with colors by hand, that look in some ways like the design i want. Then i go on(and cheat a little) and let a friend who is skillfull in photoshop cast it into pixels.

Thats some kind of a pair designing process. He does some layers with different components from several mockups and we constantly play with the colors and styles we want, until we get the components in various polished forms.

That way, we develop in a few hours, first digital drafts of our core concepts. Yes, drafts. Three is a good amount, i think. From that we select, probably with customers the best fitting one. Or the best fitting components from all three. Then we can go on and put a prerelease draft together. It's really a lot of trial and error, but in the end it pays off, i think.

The thing you absolutely need for a good design process is enough inspiration and a open mind, in my opinion.

That way drawing the mockups and pair designing the drafts, is a continous flow of good and better ideas until you reach what you need.

The Six Revisions font-face-guide reminded me of this article (http://snook.ca/archives/html_and_css/becoming-a-font-embedd...) that Snook wrote, and which I have declared to be the most complete guide on font embedding whatsoever.

It might focus more on 'front-end development' than design per se, but much of what he offers is invaluable.

So generally regarding light gray texts, one more example of "everybody has what I have."

Regarding the article: a lot of painters used black too. Even more printers. Don't you think that the books would be printed with gray or colored ink if that would be more readable? I'm sure enough experiments have shown that it just isn't. The arguments are very suspicious.

But for people in other, "left-brained" professions, enhancing creativity is less important and engaging people is less important, so it makes sense that they would see design rules as irrelevant extra work of little value.

If you assume my work requires no creativity, or that I think design rules are irrelevant, then you are mistaken. I don't like design for the sake of design. I do like design that looks good and enhances a things intended purpose.

The thing about the original article is that it's a fascinating peaking into the world of full, creative color theory. But it also seems like if what you get out of the page is "don't use black text", you've literally "learned just enough to be dangerous". It is important to keep in mind that if you're a geek who's going to wade in aesthetic theory, learning enough to

Web applications can have zillions of purposes and zillions of aesthetic considerations to go with them - fluffy pink hearts might work very well for Victoria's Secret, etc.

I have reactions similar to yours when I think about Microsoft employing Simon Peyton Jones, or the fantastically advanced people working at IBM's Watson research center. They do not represent the Microsoft or IBM I've come to know.