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by milliams 4733 days ago
Awful choice of font colour.
3 comments

The font color is dark gray #333 on a background of black #000. There's barely any contrast at all.

(edit: According to the Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser [1], the luminosity contrast ratio is 1.66:1. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines recommend a ratio of 4.5:1 [2]. That'd be #777 on #000.)

[1] http://juicystudio.com/services/luminositycontrastratio.php

[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-WCAG20-20081211/#visual-audio-...

I will be the contrarian and say it was a great choice of font color for at least 2 reasons.

The first is purpose: those dark images really stand out on the dark page, and the text is easily ignored, creating lots of attention on the photos and their extraordinary qualities (location, location, location, not to mention some pretty colors and compositions). Face it, the text is for people who want to know how it was done, which is one tenth the importance of "pics, or it... never mind."

The second is aesthetic. The article title "Mr Strauss' masterpiece" is even darker than the text, and the blog title "No Promise of Safety" is so dark as to be almost invisible. Hence, you have to assume that all choice of dark colors was intentional, thus serving some intent of the author. The idea of hiding in the shadows and having secrets revealed is strengthened by the text color.

Thus, I feel the dark text contributed to the impact of the page and its content. Not everything has to be perfectly readable or follow all rules of design.

Better than pure white though. Too much contrast is problematic for some people.
On my screen however, I literally couldn't read it without selecting all the text.