From: J. Eric "jet" Townsend, <snip - personal preferences>
> Back in the late 80s, I remember reading studies showing that > medium-orange on black was one of the best combinations in terms of > readability and eye strain. No idea who did the study or if it was > ever backed up with further research. As you, and a few others, have pointed out in this thread, there's a huge difference between what 'studies show' and what individuals actually prefer. The great thing is to try to offer flexibility, so that people can set their personal experiences up in a way that suits them. But also, to offer a decent original experience. And for most people, that's probably going to be a large size, familiar font that offers a good contrast between foreground and background. My personal recent experience of light fonts on a dark background is that many web sites in that combination have fonts that are too small. Is it a 'designer' thing? Who knows. A couple of further points (forgive me if you've heard this from me before, it's a constant rant): - it's hard to trust legibility research. The studies often over-simplify, use poorly designed materials, fail to understand the interrelationship of different factors in the examples, used technologies that are now years out of date, and have lots of other defects. I've been heard to say 'all legibility research is useless' but I probably exaggerated (a little). For a longer version of this rant, see my essay available from: http://www.upassoc.org/upa_publications/jus/2007november/jarrett.html - it's particularly challenging for users if you interleave white-on-dark with light-on-dark. I've repeatedly seen users fail to absorb information that's placed in white-on-dark headers between chunks of light-on-dark body text, and effect that is especially strong in forms. Best Caroline Jarrett Out now: "Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability" http://www.amazon.co.uk/Forms-that-Work-Interactive-Technologies/dp/15586071 02 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
