Unless, you know, you want highly readable text. In which case there's nothing better than pure black, as your text color or as your background (but not both at once, please.)
Use dark gray on white, or black on light gray, but don't use pure black on pure white. It's too much.
Remember, the contrast between white and black on computer monitors is greater than on the printed page, because computer-monitor white is brighter than a page usually.
The printed page only achieves this level of high-contrast when you're in broad daylight, like on the beach. And of course, most people wear sunglasses in that case, because it's too much.
(Of course, there are exceptions to every graphic design "rule", but avoiding pure black text on a pure white background is pretty standard one for webpages.)
Finding the right level of contrast is just as important as finding the right font size, the right width for your text column, the right typeface, etc...
I'm only kidding, but it would be sorta interesting.
and flux had like what, three configuration sliders or so? this redshift program seems better because at least it's scriptable in its "one-shot" modus.
I don't know how, but it would be great if someone could come up with a tool that does for your eyes what Flux does, but on the other hand doesn't muck up applications and instances that really do benefit from an accurate depiction of colour. If someone is looking for a "problem that needs solving", here it is :)
Many of us who use multiple monitors on our PCs are all too familiar with how hard it is to achieve consistency when dragging a window between displays. Every time I swap out a monitor on my main PC, it usually takes me about an hour of screwing around with the Nvidia control panel before I'm satisfied with the match between my new monitor and the existing one(s). I'd guess that most users with only a single monitor aren't even aware that they can change the brightness, contrast, and gamma of individual RGB components.
What that means is that spending hours tweaking your design for "just the right contrast" is guaranteed to be a waste of time. Web designers working in the real world need to make conservative choices, and that means higher contrast is almost always better than lower.
But now I wonder, green-on-black is of course based on the old CRT monitors. But in those days you also had orange-on-black monitors, is there any reason why that never caught on in hacker circles?
Or was the green-on-black just that much more ubiquitous. I gotta admit, I did write my first code on a classic green-on-black display ... but friends of me had different models of computers and just as many were orange-on-black (or very early colour models and of course TV monitors).
So if your webpage is a light gray background with black text, you can still go even brighter in specific areas. For example, you gain the extra ability to use white to give a call-to-action an extra "pop", or to delineate page sections, etc.
If your page is black text on a white background, then you can never go outside of that, so your functional design vocabulary becomes more limited.
I wish it wasn't, at least not to the extent it is in the OP blog. The text is hard to read.
I wonder why books are printed with black ink. Is it because publishers have bad designers? Or because the text is more legible that way?
It's certainly possible to go overboard with low contrast on web pages, but most of the research I've read suggests that there's a happy medium. What you want to aim for, IIRC, is around a 50-70 point difference in lightness on the LAB color scale between the main background and main body text, at least if you expect to be throwing article-length text at people rather than Twitter-length text.
What designers are trying to achieve by setting text to #333 and background to #f9f9f9 is exactly making screen contrast more like a book.
By lowering your screen brightness/contrast an unusual amount, you're solving the problem for all sites doing it wrong, but turning the ones who use proper contrast into crap. Who's to blame?
I must be in the minority, since I see many sites with light grey text, but I find it very unusable.
Screen shot: http://www.diigo.com/item/image/yjhu/t4ix?size=o
As a mac and windows user, I find this correlates heavily to the OS being used as the font rendering is very different. Black on white is very readable on windows, it looks like hell on a mac.
some people like me will just live with it because most fonts look too crapy when theyre not antialiased
Only if the lights are off in the room.
There may be such a thing as too much contrast. I haven't encountered it. But it doesn't make the text completely unreadable the way too little contrast does. When I copy+paste the text of a website into a text editor, it's always because the contrast was too low.
When it doubt, increase contrast.
pure black on light gray does not hurt my eyes, while dark gray on pure white does, after a while, late at night.
This seems to be an unfortunate new color trend. The problem is worse when zooming in on the page doesn't work or is capped.
Across monitors, contrast ratio can vary by over an order of magnitude.
I'm not saying I don't prefer black, but I don't enjoy reading black text on a white background on an OLED phone in a dark room.
My naive guess is that the only way to have pure "black" is an absence of light (ex: deep caves, deep sea, etc)
We really don't know that. All our theories fail around black holes so we can only speculate what's going on in there. And even speculation is limited by our current mental capacity, which may be insufficient to understand/explain what's going inside black holes.
Thousands of feet of water are pretty good at absorbing and reflecting all electromagnetic waves before they reach the bottom, but because it's reflective it's not a black body.
But as far as the human eye can detect, there are probably a lot of things (whether real or artificial) that are indistinguishable from this 'true black'.
[1] Black holes can trap light outside the visible range; I'm not sure if there's something that can trap the entire visible range but not everything outside it.
Plus, he played Halo in high school? Geez, I'm not young. He meant to say Doom right?
I played Doom in Highschool myself. Late(ish) highschool (class of '95 here)
Apart from that, I agree. Except that your lack of enjoyment reading from that OLED phone has not much to do with the use of pure black and everything with the use of pure white.
It's unpleasant reading #666 text on #fff background in a dark room just as much, because nobody likes looking into a bright lamp in a dark room.
Then, finally, it says that 4 days after the iPad launched (that's when this tweet happened) H&FJ had been noticing that black text looks best on the iPad (as opposed to all previous knowledge). And we have no update on their final decision about iPad type color.
I generally find that text is most easily readable when the background is very slightly darker than white, and the text is slightly lighter than black, and this has the added benefit of leaving you open to emphasize elements by increasing their contrast beyond that point.
The main useful idea that I think this article gives is this: don't use up all of your dynamic range in one place.
(Funny observation: I seem to prefer dark themes for coding Python, Ruby, C and light ones for Java)
I have one on the left eye but preferred white on black before I switched to Windows (from Linux), where the system colors are black on white and thus I have mostly windows with black on white open (a few dark terminal windows are extremely distracting).
On the other hand, I found white/colored text on blue (as modern in the 90's, e.g. Turbo Pascal and other DOS editors/IDEs) quite readable.
Bottom line: You can't please everyone.
EDIT: Also, my window borders and Unity dock are also near black. Overall, the only white backgrounds you'll see on my desktop are the occasional "loud" website or apps that don't obey my theme settings.
I personally prefer light text on dark background, but never white on black. Silver an a dark blue works great for me. But font and font weight are also factors.
Because of all those factors, black text on white background is more forgiving and more broadly expected. Which is why my websites are black on white but my vim color scheme is "darkblue".