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Comment by Cyranix | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be "that guy" but I'm genuinely having a hard time reading this page.

  * thin white text on light grey buttons
  * thin light grey text on almost matching light grey background
    (anti-spam message below email input)
  * small thin light grey text on white background
  * on highlight, dark grey text on... burnt orange?!

I'm in the target market for this program -- a developer whose design skills are pretty weak -- but the landing page is a big turn-off. Even I can recognize when fonts are needlessly small and low-contrast.

EDIT: Pull up your favorite color contrast analyzer and run this site through it. Using AccessColor, the results are ~4% failure and ~75% warning for WCAG 1.0 standards.

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There is a site dedicated to the topic actually: http://contrastrebellion.com/

I think there is a difference between "looks good aesthetically" and "readable" and sometimes making it more readable doesn't overlap with pure artistic choices, so sometimes it's the best designers that fall into this trap.

Edit: see previous discussion on this here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2807047

I might cut them a bit more slack if the image to the CTA wasn't for "Typography Crash Course"!

Thanks for the reminder on Constrast Rebellion.

I am not sure which part you are referring to, but here i see mostly black text on white background.

but that is the landing page, the email itself is indeed hard to read (all the problems you mentioned).. I waited several seconds after opening the email because I thought the CSS haven't finished rendering.

I see black text on white background as well, but since multiple people are mentioning this problem, I'm suspecting that the landing page is being A/B tested as we speak.

UPDATE: Either the maintainers are responding to feedback or, as speculated downthread, some A/B testing is going on. If the latter is the case, pick B, for the love of all that is holy!

Responding to feedback because I love you and you were right.

Agreed.

I kept mousing over the low contrast areas expecting it to dynamically change to a darker font.... no dice.

What operating system are you using? It looks great on OS X 10.8.2.

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