I absolutely hate light text on dark background. There are a few sites I'd really like to follow (hello hackaday), but their insistence on light text on dark background makes them a pain to read. And it kind of feels like the website says "because fuck you".
There is no shortage of "helpful" people who suggest I use all manner of browser plugins to "fix" poor design choices. Eh, no. That is not a solution. If people want to be oddball and weird they can do whatever they want, but I won't be spending much time on their websites.
The author responded to this exact feedback in the comments:
“No, the way medium's designers set things up, the text color follows the background color. The user (me) has no way of controlling that.
The page was set lower than FFF because FFF is also much too bright. In light mode, Page luminance needs to be around 80 to no more than 90.
I've been experimenting to see if there is a way to improve Medium's poor, inaccessible design choices.
Unfortunately, attempting to use web inspector while in design mode, they crash the browser, so you have to publish each iteration to then go and inspect how the text colors end up.
And it's actually worse than I imaginged. Medium actually makes the text worse when you choose a color other than FFF. As as I stated, FFF is much too bright.
Ultimately, I think I am going to leave it in a dark mode, until I move my articles to a better site.”
That's rich: he lambasts people for poor typography and then blames the poor typography of his own blog on someone else. As if he had no choice in the matter. Like using a different blog platform. Or setting up his own website.
As a counterpoint, for me light text on a dark background is easier to read than black text on a white background. Go figure. So much so that I sometimes create dark-mode CSS user scripts for sites that don't offer a dark mode.
For me it depends and I am not entirely sure I understand why.
I use a relatively dark blue/green background in VS Code, with light, low saturation yellowish base color for the code. Before VS Code I used the same dark color scheme for 25+ years in Emacs. But this is for editing code where I have a bunch of colors that have a semantic job to do. The colors are a bit easier to identify precisely against a darker background. And I don't actually read code per se - I scan and orient by shape (formatting) most of the time. So editing code is very distinct from reading.
For prose/text I find it tiring to have a dark background. Not least because people get the contrast wrong because they don't know that it is different for dark backgrounds. And from an aesthetic point of view it strikes me as a bit ... well, demonstrative and perhaps childish. I'm sure this impression isn't shared by everyone, but that's the feeling i get.
And then there's what you can make work on the web.
(Interesting observation: I'm a big fan of what Erik Spiekermann says about typography - yet both the book he wrote for Adobe ("Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works") and a book about him ("Hello, I am Erik") have horribly annoying typesetting. One has horribly ugly guillemets that look like someone has taken a metal file to the type, the other has type in white-on-pink, which ought to qualify for a severe paddlin'. Is there a rule that whenever someone tries to write something about typography, things go wrong? :-).
One possible explanation might be in one of Spiekermann's writings (can't remember where), where he emphasizes that "good tyography" isn't always the best choice because what people are used to plays a really big role. So a poor type can in some circumstances be better than a well designed type, simply because people are more familiar with it, so they'll have less trouble reading text typeset in the bad, but familiar, type)
Thankfully your browser can indicate if you prefer dark or light designs and the website's CSS can adapt to that. Unfortunately desktop browsers do no make that setting accessible for normal users (mobile browsers follow the system theme, desktop browsers might in some cases). Also Firefoxe's enhanced tracking protection means you want light themes instead of the more sensible "no preference".
> And before we continue, let’s make it absolutely clear that we have no control of the color of the text in this very article, as it is hosted through Medium.com, ...
sigh
I absolutely hate light text on dark background. There are a few sites I'd really like to follow (hello hackaday), but their insistence on light text on dark background makes them a pain to read. And it kind of feels like the website says "because fuck you".
There is no shortage of "helpful" people who suggest I use all manner of browser plugins to "fix" poor design choices. Eh, no. That is not a solution. If people want to be oddball and weird they can do whatever they want, but I won't be spending much time on their websites.