Design Tip: Never Use Black (2012)

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;
      }
    }

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

It works the same way for paintings, screens, oleds, etc. So when the author is talking about "black" they're using it in the same way that a normal person would talk about "black"--it's a very dark color.

I had an HP Deskjet that you had to swap out the color CMY cartridge for the black cartridge, otherwise black was a dark green.

My newest printer is CMYK and the black is crisp.

Here’s a similar article with pixel art examples:

http://samkeddy.com/pixel-art-outlines-part-2-using-color/

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.

“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.

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.

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/...

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