‘Has Your Web Designer Ever Heard of Contrast?’

Typographica is guilty of this, IMO. It's one of the sites that I either have to lean forward to be able to read the text, or increase the font size. (IE, OSX.) It would be nice if perhaps a cookie told the browser my font size preference.

The guy has a point, when grey text is taken to an extreme on webpages. I think full black text looks harsh, and text of #333 smooths out a webpage nicely without sacrificing readibility. The RealOne example looks like #999.

Edward Tufte writes of the principle of the 'smallest available difference'. Contrast is very useful, but should be used like a laser and not a shotgun. A Tuftean approach would save the high contrast areas for what the user really needs to do or the most important area of the page. The rest should be lower contrast, at the minimum perceivable difference. The less important a feature is the lower contrast it should be. Something like the RealOne logo, or other 'chartjunk', should practically be a watermark or excised altogether if possible.

I just redesigned my blog, and was thinking about just this very thing. I decided that the threshold for my layout was #444 for the text with a pure white background.

Martin - what size of monitor are you using and
what's your resolution set at?

I usually design with a dark charcoal grey text. Against a white background, it looks like black to the eye, but the colour is a little more even and blends in with the page more nicely.

Paul

Stephen - I think we already had the discussion about text size. My monitor size/rez is not relevant. Compared to other sites that I can read comfortably, typographica's text is too small and too light - for me, at least. Darkening the text, as the article suggests, would probably solve the problem for me. (Or, if the color remained mid-gray then increasing the font size would do it.)

Other sites allow user setttings:

Bigger Text at A List Apart:
http://www.alistapart.com/index.html

Choose background color at Camworld:
http://www.camworld.com/

both seem to be cookies that remember on revisiting the sites.

Let's not go quoting overrated anecdotalist curiosity Edward Tufte here.

Who's the information design theorist who's a sex machine with all the chicks?

Tufte!

Damn right.

He's a bad mother-

Shut yo mouth.

Just talkin' bout Tufte.

> My monitor size/rez is not relevant

It does matter if it's freaky.

And Joe, Tufte is da man.

hhp

When I design, I most often use #333 for the text, and #EEE for the screen... site visitors shouldn't be high-beamed.

A (very) little less contrast seems to make all the difference when it comes to readability. The corrolary would be a very dark brown (or burgundy) ink on a very light cream paper.

But #999? Man... that's not text, that's a watermark.

"It would be nice if perhaps a cookie told the browser my font size preference."

I have been railing on Stephen since day one about this issue. Allowing users to specify their own font size is democratic. Unfortunately that railing has passed without action.

For many years metafilter.com has allowed users to choose font, font-size, and color and retain this information in a cookie. Now Wired.com allows users to choose font size.

Anyway, I agree. This site is difficult to read.

> a very dark brown (or burgundy) ink
> on a very light cream paper.

Hmmm.
:-)

Oh, and Democracy can eat me.

hhp

Hehe, it just MIGHT! Having had too much totalitarian and dictator leadership, I've heard it's hungry.

To enlarge copy that has been written using HTML you can simply use Option and the +/= key on the keyboard. To reduce again, option and _/- key.

I don't know what the command would be on a PC.

I am so sorry. LOL! It's NOT the option key. It's instead the command key.

command + +
or
command -

I was thinking command and wrote out option instead. I was thinking of options.

:-)

Alternatively, Typographica could be designed with larger and more contrasty type. Right now, for me the analogy I can make is that if Typographica was a paperback novel it would be set in something like 8 point type, with that right hand sidebar the equivalent of 4 point footnotes.

I'm confused, Marty. This page at your site is set in even smaller type over a less contrasty background. Would you describe it as readable? I don't mean to get your goat – you know I love Daze – just trying to get at your meaning.

I have a pc and a mac here. All my mac browsers - IE, Netscape, Safari display Typographica as having much smaller text than, say Yahoo, or Google News or any other text-heavy site. The bio page at my site admittedly has a background issue, but the text is black and is "normal" size. On IE on the pc these sites look much the same as they do on the mac.

Here is a screenshot in Safari of both sites:

http://www.stareat.us/compare.jpg

The file is temporary.

Hmm, and I see smaller text at Daze. Why is that? Is it my font size prefs or my monitor ppi?

Stephen, if it is any consolation I greatly enjoy the dark grey of Typographica. I find the increased line spacing to more than make up for any downfalls in readability.

The trend I dislike the most in web pages is an evolution toward white pages with gray text. I'm sure it's a trend, and next year Typographi.ca will have orange text on a purple background, and I'll probably hate it. But for me, right now, the white/gray thing that everyone and their bloggin' gramma are busting out seems so constrained and timid. There's so much fun with color out there. Go crazy.

Stephen - Post a screenshot of how it looks on your screen.
Presumably you've seen Typographica on other people's computers. Seeing as you are probably using Mac OSX I have no idea why your browser would display type at different sizes to other people.
In the code these pages seem to have pixel size specifications for fonts, as opposed to the old school, out-moded font tags that litter the html of mine. How that affects the view in your browser I don't know, but maybe it has bearing on the matter that some code jockey can enlighten us with.

Hrant... the burgundy/cream comment was an appreciation of print material. The linked site was, um, interesting... but not what I had in mind.

: )

For a better approximation of what I had in mind try The Sudbury Archives.

What is the deal with this recurring criticism of Tufte, Joe? Not just you - I've heard it from others, mostly people who have never actually read a book of his or looked up any of the citations - his work looks, at least from here, to be pretty well grounded in research, his own and that of legitimate researchers at legitimate institutions. I really don't understand why you would call him an "anecdotalist;" every statement made in the three books has as much support as research findings in your average peer reviewed and edited academic journal. Certainly most of the little criticism Tufte gets is from lay readers who don't like any suggestion that there may be some objective syllogistic ruleset that their own pandering and proselytized design dogma doesn't quite fit into. Nothing personal, but Tufte's work (I'm not going to say anything about him as a person as I don't know either of you) has infinitely more grounding in research and fact than the vast majority of the pop-modern crap presented by the chain bookstores in the form of "usability for dummies" etc. Certainly he is more useful for those of us who actually want to know WHY things work and don't, as opposed to those who would rather sometimes-appropriate and easy-to-digest rules forcefed to avoid actually thinking critically about what we do for a living.

I have my reasons, and I've read every Tufte book. I tend not to make uninformed remarks about graphic design.

Just a side note, that may be of some interest of typographica readers. Tuftes wife Inge Druckrey teaches letterform design (she taught me as a matter of fact) She teachs at University of the Arts. You can read faculty bios and see some of their work as well as student work at
http://www.uarts.edu/gd/

Vision...love the 'high beam' comment. I'm stealing it! ;o)

Joe, what *are* your reasons re: not liking tufte? We're curious...

*beaming like a proud parent*

Thanks, Darren!

I just wish I was that clever all the time.

*sigh*

(doh! "Darrel")

Joe, I have mixed feelings about Tufte. On the positive side, I guess I agree with JLT about his research-based ideas. I even actually like some of his platitudes e.g., "Don't get it original. Get it right." But I agree with your assessment that he's overrated. To an extent, Tufte is to information design as Jason Kottke is to weblogs.