White and light gray together - a recent web design fad?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Two of my favourite websites, Greater Good and Cracked, have recently changed their websites so that there’s a lot of white on a light gray background. To my eye, this looks bad, because the white and the light gray don’t really stand out well enough against each other. Also, text boxes on both sites tend to have a really thin, really light gray border that also doesn’t stand out much. Ugh.

I was wondering - have you seen this trend on other websites? Is it in fact a “trend” at all, or maybe it’s just these two websites?

(Not sure if this goes in GQ or IMHO.)

2

Would you include eBay and Wikipedia among this trend? They all use shades of light gray to separate different parts of the page.

3

Yeah, them too.

Maybe Greater Good and Cracked were following the examples of Wikipedia and Ebay, since those latter two are bigger/better-known sites?

4

Am I blind? Why do I not see this?

The new font Cracked uses is ugly as shit, though.

5

I have also noticed this on an obscure site called “The Straight Dope”, especially on the message board section.

6

Now that you mention it… yes! Odd that I hadn’t noticed it here. Maybe because GreaterGood and Cracked only changed their site format/colours recently.

Also, because here on this site, the gray isn’t light enough to annoy me, I guess.

7

Yahoo’s been doing it.
Yes, I use yahoo (at work) as my homepage. That way I get little headlines throughout the day. I like it, wanna fight about it. Anyways, now they grey out links I’ve clicked on instead of making them purple like the entire rest of the internet. The reason that bugs me is because (at least for a while) they’re soooo grey I almost can’t see them. They seem to have darkened them a bit. If the link/headline includes a picture, even the picture will be greyed out.

8

Well, the entire rest of the internet with the exception of certain sites, like, say, this obscure one called “The Straight Dope”…

9

I’m not seeing any of this at all. Could it depend on which browser you’re using?

10

Wikipedia does it with light blue, and I hate it so much that I use the old, outdate skin instead. Light grey is not so bad.

In fact, I’d say the problem with the blue is that it makes it stand out more. The entire point of using a light color like that is to make the difference stand out less. It’s just barely there to provide structure.

11

Facebook had white text boxes on light blue, but the light blue is dark enough that it doesn’t bother me.

12

I am not seeing this color scheme on the Greater Good site because I do not have my default browser background set to white. Now that is bad web design! I do not use a white default because if (as is sometimes the case) I want to read very simple pages consisting of little more than text on a default background, I find pure white white to bright and glaring. However, if a site is going for a particular look or color scheme with different areas in different colors, as most now do, they should explicitly set the color of the background, or the result is neither what they intend nor what the user wants.

This used to happen a lot a few years ago, but I though competent web designers had learned better by now.

This does not happen at Cracked, incidentally, and I have no problem with their use of white and gray, but I detest the new Cracked design for other reasons.

13

Apple is to blame.

The default gamma on Apple computers is 1.8, while the default gamma on the computers the vast majority of the world uses is 2.2 (though they apparently have corrected it in the most current version of OSX). This makes moronic things like while on light grey look OK on the designer’s Mac, and like shit on the computer’s the rest of the world uses.

14

I think that may explain it.

Now that I think of it, I see this white-and-light-gray design on more and more websites.

15

I call those “MacBook sites”. They look fine on the MacBook of the alleged “website designer”, and those losers never check on anything else.

16

See, I deal with that by fixing my monitor so that white isn’t so dadblasted bright. Very occasionally I have problems with videos shot by amateurs that winds up too dark, but, otherwise, it’s a lot better. Your eyes naturally adjust to see white as whatever appears closest to white in front of you.

My white is much closer to the color of paper in bright sunlight.