On 03/12/2011 10:16 PM, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Even with a brightness
> setting matching the ambient light (many people I know have turned the
> backlight up way too high), longer blocks of white text on a dark
> background have the nasty habit of leaving an after-image in my eyes, as
> demonstrated by this site:http://www.ironicsans.com/owmyeyes/.
>
That's a very poor example of light-on-dark: It's all-bold, pure-white on
pure-black. Even light-on-dark fans don't do that. The "white" is normally a
grey.
It's very strange. What the text on this page explains, complaining about light
text on dark background, is exactly what I experience when reading text with
the opposite combination, eg PDFs.
His text holds a link that switches colors (thus suddenly displaying black on
white): this kills my eyes! I have to zap away at once.
I must admit I'm kind of an exceptional case in that my eyes are extra
sensitive to light (there are called "pair" eyes in french, I don't know the
english term). On the nice side, I can see very well at night, on the other
side, excess light hurts me badly very fast. But an ophtalmologist explained me
what I experience is just normal reaction, simply over-sensitive, that what
hurts me strongly and fast hurts everyone else on the long run (sounds obvious).
Another obvious remark (not from me, read on the web) is that what is good for
paper is not good for screens; because they are light sources. Reading text on
white backgroung is like staring at an intensely luminous sky, without moving
your sight: doesn't this hurt you?
On this other hand, it seems that pure white text on pure black bg is far too
be an optimal combination; text looks hard too read. I guess the reason is that
fonts are originally drawn for the opposite combination, and also for paper.
Full B/W or W/B contrast seems a bad scheme in both cases.
What looks nice and readible instead is choosing ~ 25% lightness bg, 75%
lightness fg, with the same hue; one can also adjust saturation to increase or
decrease contrast.
The opposite (dark on light with 25%/75% saturation) is also pleasant and
non-agressive. Why insist on imposing black on white? I guess this has to do
with our civilisation demanding clean / white / uniform things. Like hospitals.
An esthetic of death. (Sorry for the personal tone, if ever you mind.)
Denis
--
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vita es estrany
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