[jaysonelliot]

I've been very interested lately in the idea of monochromatic interfaces.

Aside from being easier on the eyes (especially an amber or red interface), they force UI designers to make careful choices, and potentially result in a cleaner, more useable interface.

It's not a project for me yet, just a series of notes and concepts, but I'd like to turn it into a proof of concept at the very least.

[kbutler]

Having made extensive use of amber and green and b&w monitors, I much prefer full color.

Though I dislike the recent low-contrast efforts. Keep high contrast, reduce brightness as desired for your environment.

[mikekchar]

I totally agree with this. I've spent hours and hours selecting colour palettes that give high contrast (I work on 16 colour terminals because more than 16 colours makes it really difficult to guarantee good contrast in all situations).

Having said that, it's hard to beat black on white for contrast ;-) However, I think one of the reasons people like the monochromatic themes (especially white on black) is the same -- they want high contrast with low brightness. By having the background black, they guarantee a low brightness. And when white is too bright, they go for amber.

I find that by doing the reverse (black on white) and setting my brightness very low (I often go as low at 7%, but more normally 11% back light) I have a very comfortable display with a lot more options. It's really funny, though, because when I have to run software that doesn't follow my colour themes, the computer almost looks like it's turned off. If I'm playing a game, I have to crank up the brightness to 70% or 80% in the same lighting conditions.

[gm-conspiracy]

I just thought you had a fondness for EGA.

[kuschku]

The problem of the low contrast issue is that otherwise content becomes unusuable on calibrated screens.

On a modern screen, a value of 100% is 1000 nits, 0% is far below 1 nits.

On an average shitty monitor, it's more a range 10 times more limited.

Your suggestion of making my monitor emulate your shitty monitor in hardware settings would also make it impossible to use it for use cases that do need this high contrast.

Reading text, on the other hand, gets very painful with that much contrast.

Real text, on a real newspaper, in normal room light, is #454545 text on #f0f0f0 background, in sRGB color space. Not #000 on #fff in sRGB, and definitely not 0 on max on ten times more contrast.

The real issue is that we have no color and contrast management at all for websites. I can't say that a color is meant to mean a certain brightness in nits, so it renders as #777 on my screen, and #000 on yours.

[kbutler]

Gosh, I didn't realize my new MBP had such a bad screen.

Low-contrast UIs can work well in a typical office environment on bright screens.

Take your ideally calibrated monitor, and use it as a second screen while watching a movie in your darkened home theater. Now take it and use it outside on a sunny day.

I prefer to adjust the brightness. YMMV.

Your description of sRGB is incorrect. sRGB was specified for CRT screens in 1996, used in an ideal viewing environment that is very dimly lit ("The current proposal assumes an encoding ambient luminance level of 64 lux which is more representative of a dim room in viewing computer generated imagery... While we believe that the typical office or home viewing environment actually has an ambient luminance level around 200 lux, we found it impractical to attempt to account for the resulting large levels of flare that resulted" https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB.html)

That doesn't match my viewing environments, which include the range above.

[kuschku]

MBP? That's surprising to hear then, they've got great (not $1600 Dell HDR monitor perfect, but great) monitors.

One of the core issues is constantly fiddling with the brightness, especially with multiple monitors.

That's where ideally you'd want to have the brightness of the panel fixed, and change it with a lookup map, e.g. what f.lux does for color mapping at night.

That's where you'd get ideal results, would be able to enjoy media in high quality without having trouble with too high contrast or too low contrast websites, and you could choose separate profiles for text and media.

Not everything supports this yet, but with the move to HDR10 and DolbyVision, support is getting better, because now people do have content in the same window that's mastered with completely different contrast ratios (the min for HDR10 is "moonless night", the max is "as bright as sunlight on a cloudless day", while for text the ideal min/max is newspaper text)

[kbutler]

You'd have to adjust both brightness and white balance based on the environment (just like a camera. How well do professionals trust the camera's automatic choices?) and probably the environment behind the screen (the rest of the user's field of view).

And then you'd probably need to throw in an adjustment for the individual user's light sensitivity needs and preferences, and possibly the user's current eye dilation (did I just go from bright light into a dark room? Or did I just wake up in the dark room?)

You can design for an ideal environment, but realize that users will not always (ever?) be in that ideal.

[kuschku]

Sure, but the goal is that the user sets their brightness for the environment, and not ever for individual software.

The per-application brightness should be done in software, and ideally take into account HDR and colorspace capability of the software.

Otherwise, like the user above had suggested, you have to switch brightness every time you switch between different programs.

[WorldMaker]

Something I found interesting related to monochromatic interfaces was an article posted several weeks back to HN about people using grayscale to help focus. Most systems, especially, support a grayscale view for accessibility reasons (on recent versions of Windows 10 it's the default for the Win+Ctrl+C keyboard shortcut which is also why it is going around as one of the annoy a coworker pranks). I've started toying with grayscale periods on my work machine as a focus tool.