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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

I don't mind small font sizes as long as you don't do anything to break zoom in the browser.

What is killing me a lot more lately is the trend towards extremely low contrast sites, like white backgrounds with almost-white text. This is starting to be everywhere recently and it is horrible.

I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor, designer, but on mine I can barely even see there are words there let alone easily read them. Supplying a user-defined CSS or constantly highlighting paragraphs is much more painful than a zooming in with the scroll wheel or a simple gesture.

So I agree with the point the article is making but I think there are currently bigger fish to fry when it comes to painful design trends on the web.

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I agree that low contrast sucks.

I also agree that breaking zoom is a silly thing for designers to do.

But small font sizes, and expecting the average user to know that they can zoom, is wrong.

All three are symptoms of a bigger problem - some designers are either ignorant about usable design, or just don't care about a significant portion of users.

> expecting the average user to know that they can zoom

I'm all for never overestimating the technical literacy of one's users, but .. really? The average person doesn't even know they CAN zoom? That seems an "ignoratum too far", like not knowing they can alter the volume on their stereo.

Touch screen devices make it ridiculously easy, too. Surely the average user has worked out by now that they can change the size of a web site they are viewing.

Maybe on tablets and smart phones most people know they can zoom.

I strongly believe, but have nothing to support it, that most people don't know they can zoom their browsers.

Average desktop user does not know how to zoom. I have done hundreds of usability tests and user observation in my time - the number of folk who know how to zoom text is vanishingly small.

Well, thanks for the depressing truth. I'll have to adjust my assumptions. It's turned into a learning experience.

For a long time browsers shipped with basically broken zoom functionality. You could zoom, but it would break the page layout completely, make menu links disappear and images look ugly. It wasn't until WebKit browsers like Chrome came around that zooming to undo designers micro font sizes became usable in practice. There are still lots of sites around that breaks when zoomed in for one reason (flash) or another.

No designer would really like to design for or see their designs printed on low quality paper, and I think the same goes for the web.

Idea: a browser feature (plugin) just like zoom, only that would up the contrast on sites (or decrease, too).

It would have to be semi-intelligent to adjust the brightness accordingly (so it would work both on light-gray-on-white sites and dark-gray-on-black sites), but having an in-browser contrast control would be great.

There's a Chrome extension that does something like that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/high-contrast/djcf...

I've resorted to using "Change Colors" (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/change-colors/jbmk...) - which has the advantage of allowing me to specify my own fonts too.

It doesn't always work.

I also use Readability.

One workaround: Use 'zap colors' bookmarklet found at https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html. I got this link from some other HN comments.

The first thing I do on a new browser is to drag the 'zap colors' bookmarklet to the bookmarks toolbar.

While agree that low-contrast is a problem, it's rather uncommon still except on web designer's sites (ironically enough). We may read a lot of them, but overall they're a drop in the bucket. The web has categorically low font size however, so the font size really is the bigger fish.

+1. Previously on HN: http://contrastrebellion.com/

I'm sure that design looks great on your Pantone-calibrated monitor,

Bizarrely, no, it doesn't. A lot of trendy design styles like low contrast bright sites and tiny (or, recently, huge) text really are just as impractical and/or do look just as ugly on a very good screen to a trained eye.

I haven't seen anything that breaks zoom in the browser (do you have an example?) but many of the responsive-type sites break the pinch zooming on mobile which is extremely annoying, especially if they have images that hang off the viewable area of the screen.

Strong point you're making here. Pantone-calibrated monitors only make sense when you'll be doing actual printing.

A webdesigner using Pantone shades for a website is just being a delusional fool.

With the quality of the monitors nowadays, and standard profiles, it's not that far off. We're not in the nineties, monitor technology wise.

Actually, I've heard people saying that CRT screens were better than LCD when it came to colors. A couple of problems that LCD monitors might have:

- low viewing angle

- color shifting if they're using a TN or MVA/PVA panel [1]

- loss of dark details for MVA/PVA panels [2]

- 6 bits per color channel like the pretty recent Dell U2412M monitor for example [3]

Sure if you're using a good (and expensive) monitor like Dell U2410 (comes precalibrated) or HP LP2475w you won't have these problems, but not everyone has them. Let's also not forget laptops which have crappy displays most of the time.

[1] http://lcdtech.no-ip.info/en/tests/color-shift.htm

[2] http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1034585910&amp%3bpos...

[3] http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_u2412m.htm

A given CRT would be more consistent from different angles, but, having been there and tuned color on both CRTs and LCDs, the latter tend to be far more consistent between different displays. Also over time.

There are still vendor differences, and Mac vs. Windows color temperature differs as well.

> Mac vs. Windows color temperature differs as well.

And what's the thing that makes something dark on Windows become really dark on a Mac? Is that gamma?

Yes, Gamma.

Though that has changed 2 OS versions ago -- new Macs come with the same gamma as PCs.

I agree there are concerns with readability at certain LCD viewing angles. I often test my projects on a range of "run of the mill" monitors and more often than not I find that the contrast is horrid (at any angle) although it looks perfect on my setup. Thus, I usually increase styling contrast more than what I feel is necessary, in order to ensure an acceptable experience for all users.

I assume you live in Europe, the USA or maybe Canada. In much of the world, people are still using CRTs or ten-year-old LCDs in large amounts.

I currently live in SE Asia. And everybody is using LCDs.

A webdesigner using Pantone shades for a website is just being a delusional fool.

Expecting everyone viewing your site to see a precisely matched colour, whether it's from a PMS chip or any other reference, is... optimistic.

But that doesn't make starting from a client's standard Pantone branding colours (or rather, their official RGB equivalents) delusional. It won't get perfect results, but what would be a better choice?

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