Ask HN Designers: Why the trend of low-contrast site design?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6460895

by tomrod • 13 years ago

8 10 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Howdy HN! I'm not a designer, but have a question for designers or others more informed than me.

Is there a trend towards using low-contrast text and graphics on blogs among designers?

Here is an example from a link submitted to HN yesterday: http://blog.olgabotvinnik.com/post/58941062205/prettyplotlib-painlessly-create-beautiful-matplotlib

This blog post seems representative of this trend I've seen.

I find this hard to read on monitors and tablets, personally.

Three questions:

1. What would be the design justification for choosing light text on white background?

2. Is this an up-and-coming trend others are noticing?

3. Is this a good idea for some reason I'm missing?

Turing_Machine• 13 years ago

(disclaimer: not a designer)

My theory is that they're all blindly copying Apple. The thing is, Apple does that for occasional highlighting (ad copy, e.g.), not for gigantic blocks of text. Any long-form text on Apple's site is in black (or near-black) text on white (or near-white) background.

I sure wish they'd stop doing this. Do they not actually want people to read their blogs (or whatever)?

throwaway420• 13 years ago

Lack of contrast is a design trend that's been going on for quite a while.

However, I don't think the example you cited is a particularly egregious example of lack of contrast. It's not ideal, but it's much better than the gray on light gray body text I've seen before.

There's actually a formula you can measure this.

http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

The color code of #626566 on a background of #FFF yields a ratio of about 5.9 to 1.

irollboozers• 13 years ago

Related: the web's most viral colors

http://www.shift8creative.com/posts/view/the-web-s-most-vira...

Actually, I think one trend that we'll see soon is standard color palettes that will serve as signals or templates for user flows.

gcb12• 13 years ago

it is all efficiency vs comfort trade offs.

if your task is important you pay close attention and so rather deep contrast and separation. also the more on the screen the better.

if you are just dicking around you want low contrast and lots and lots of white space.

so, ignore all the trend talk. real reason is that the internet is finally embracing the so talked short attention span and frivolity.

btw, you study all that in the few psychology, marketing and semiotics classes in ... oh, designers classes today have none because they are not the old and outdated industrial design of yesterday. now they have photoshop and flash. and the final thesis can be a website.

tomrod• 13 years ago

I guess I could see that in some previous trends (eyecandy of FB, G+, things like that). But this trend proves difficult to read -- so both efficiency and comfort are lacking.

gcb12• 13 years ago

confort =! readability

comfort is keeping short attention span people just clicking around and looking at pictures.

chetanahuja• 13 years ago

Best I can tell, it's a trend because it's a trend. It'll live out it's lifetime exactly like any other fashion or trend cycle. The origins are murky or lost to history.

It'll run it's course for a couple of years and will change to something else. High contrast will suddenly be cool again. The self-aware among the designers and creators will shrug and follow the next trend with a resigned attitude. The less self-aware ones will teach themselves to see the beauty in the new system. There will be long, impassioned blog posts about why low-contrast was wrong - all wrong. It was all done before the person writing the blog post had been out of college so of course s/he was not responsible for any of it... and so goes the circle of life.

toonbit• 13 years ago

UX Designer here. In my first 4 or so years of web designing I found I did this often. Low contrast elements is they easy/lazy way out, you can clearly give things more importance just by giving the element greater contrast, but it's not good design. In my case it was learning this. Learning to feel comfortable with every single element I was putting on the page, learning how to balance correctly contrasted objects, giving elements the right sizing and ultimately having confidence as a designer.

cprncus• 13 years ago

I think the trend is because designers see low contrast as "chic" and readable contrast as garish. But it's a bad decision.

Fight the power: http://contrastrebellion.com/

ulisesrmzroche• 13 years ago

There is no justification for low-contrast text unless you want people not to read what you write. I'll put money that a simple A/B shows that very few people stayed more than 15 seconds on that blog post.

Ask HN Designers: Why the trend of low-contrast site design?

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