It seems to me that many websites color their text gray, where I would expect black. One simple example is the news site Reuters, which puts their headlines in bold black, but it seems that the text of the news articles are non-bold gray.
(Please, no posts about Reuters themselves. I’ve been wanting to ask this here for a very long time, and an article there simply had the luck to push me to actually post today.)
My first question is whether I am correct or not. I do believe that it really is gray, because I have taken screenshots and then magnified them to a point where the letters are really thick, and it is clear to me that it is NOT solid black. But maybe others don’t see it that way.
Second question is WHY? It seems to me that the higher contrast of a black font is much easier to read than murky gray. But maybe there are artistic or other considerations that I’m not aware of. I can understand using gray as a way of de-emphasizing details like legal notices, but that makes no sense regarding the main text of whatever it is that your website is trying to do.
I’ve noticed this too and always assumed it was another case of artsy-fartsy defeating common sense and practical. Nobody even won design awards for saying “let’s keep using standard black and white”.
It looks better, and it helps bolding to stand out more.
Nearly every website out there that has somebody actually design it uses dark greys rather than black. And why wouldn’t you? Above a certain contrast level all the colours are easy enough to read, so you might as well use a wide variety of them
(not a graphic designer BTW. But it makes sense to me)
The reason for the dark gray text instead of black is that it was thought for a long time that too great a contrast (black on white) caused eyestrain, and that people would be more likely to stay on your page longer if you reduced the contrast slightly by making the text gray. Subjectively, many designers feel that gray text “looks better”. Both Apple and Google adopted the use of gray text, and other web designers followed their lead.
More recently, designers have become concerned about legibility and have realized that there is no evidence that black text causes eyestrain, so the trend is slowly moving back. The very large company I work for had a standard of dark gray text for many years, but last year switched to black on white.
People may vary in their visual perception printed material, but:
I find the dark-gray text on a white background to be somewhat easier on the eyes, somehow. It’s more than enough contrast to read clearly. It’s reminiscent of the color of #2 pencil lead on bright white paper.
I understand how important it is for the bolding to stand out, but I always figured it is sufficient to increase the font size of the bolding, without deprecating the regular text to gray.
This is what I suspected. I guess I’m in the minority in preferring high contrast. It’s possible that my eyes are just getting old, but now that I think of it, I have always preferred strong contrasts and lots of detail.
I like black on a very soft grey background so it does not glare when reading in bed at night.
I absolutely detested Fortean Times with the tiny white font on black, they even did it in their print version of the magazine. Horrible to try and read, it usually gave me headaches after about half an hour.
I dunno. I suspect half of them are so close visually to the ones next to them that they’re not worth mentioning. There’s thousands of such pages online, I happened to choose that one as an example.
For what it’s worth, that page doesn’t use pure black either They use #1b1b1b and #191919.
I like what they’re doing, though. Personally, I trust a designer that knows the difference between #000000 and #1b1b1b.
Another factor is that most people have their monitors set way to bright, increasing eyestrain and fatigue. If I set my monitors to their defaults, the image is way too bright and blue. The same thing for HDTVs, which many people believe vivid or store display mode is how itʻs supposed to look.
They use