| The contrast examples in this article are a continuation in a poor trend of monkey see monkey do design that seems to come out of a reliance and reuse of original base bootstrap styles. Designers seem to love to decide that certain text doesn't look right, is unimportant compared to that stock image they spent 3 hours selecting. A great tip for cheating on design regarding typography is to completely drop "grey" from options. What will happen is that during any manner of stress testing, usability or accessibility testing someone will immediately point out the lack of legibility. More importantly when your site is audited for accessibility issues, you will fail on contrast every time. I realize this was written as tips to help non designers but most "designers" should be staying away from making decisions about font color that lean towards "grey". The cost and effort in development of most written copy far exceeds the value of this design trend that leads to low legibility, low impact type. Web designers need to get back to the basics of typography. The web as a whole and "start up" style sites particularly suffer greatly from design choices by designers who clearly never actually read what they layout. |
I see this problem in the footer almost universally. High contrast footers have somehow become rare. I understand the desire to de-emphasize that section versus the primary content of a page, however if the footer is going to actually do its job I think it makes sense to have it set to a higher contrast design than not.