Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by juiceandjuice 4801 days ago
Designmodo and the Flat-UI is pretty mediocre to poor at contrast. I forked the project and ended up ripping out a lot of the components which were low contrast and modifying the palette to have high contrast, then modifying the borders to my own inset/outset values to have a more muted level change on the buttons but still have them look somewhere between flat and and normal buttons. I did experiment with an inside white border on buttons for an Classic Mac OS feel (the original monochrome "Flat UI" )

Much of the flat aesthetic is rooted in swiss graphic poster design, however that doesn't translate so well to pages where dense text actually matters, especially with poor color choices. Much of designmodo's color scheme actually fails the contrast algorithm for small text, except at larger text it's generally okay. Bootstrap itself is pretty abysmal as far as this goes as well.

The flat aesthetic is nice, but those who continue on with it with disregard to contrast will not succeed. Accessibility and the flat aesthetic is possible, it takes more work and compromise, however.

1 comments

Is your fork public or are there any screens, etc. available? Sounds good.