iSean

i am not a web designer by training, nor have i have spent much time learning about the intricacies of design. heck, i didn’t even stay at a holiday inn express last night. that being said, i think all educators are responsible for making their online learning content as accessible as is possible and that includes the design of the online materials we use. in that vein, i have always thought that black text on a white background is necessary on the web. i made no exceptions for the longest time. but, i have slowly decided that black text on a white background can have a darker background off to the side as seen here on my upcoming Drupal class website:

notice how i have dark blue around the edges? not much i admit, but the text is still black on white. my blog follows this principal as well. i notice many blogs have light text on a dark background and i think i get slightly annoyed when i see it, but only because i have ingrained in my head that this is bad design; not for any practical reason.

i had a display go bad on me recently. i bought a new dell 20 LCD and went about setting the desktop background (this is my secondary display as my main apple display is 22″, just FYI). i started thinking about the color of background that i’d use on the desktop and decided that a very dark (e.g., black) background would be best for the display because that uses less light (if any at all). come to think of it, a white background is really like turning on a light behind the screen — that can’t be as good for the display in the long run. a screen is not like paper because a screen is illuminated. i wonder how pleasing that is to our eyes to stare all day at illuminated screens? that got me to pondering things.

further, i use a tool on my Mac called TextMate for my text editing needs (particularly Ruby and web programming). i have found that i particularly enjoy the inverted colors for my text documents as seen in this file i am working on:

now i obviously use multiple colors, which helps me to see various elements of the file more easily, but i really like staring at the darker screen for long periods of time and i tried a white background with colors as well.

i even came across a blog that discusses using dark backgrounds and states:

When reversing color out, e.g., white text on black, make sure you increase the leading, tracking and decrease your font-weight. This applies to all widths of Measure. White text on a black background is a higher contrast to the opposite, so the letterforms need to be wider apart, lighter in weight and have more space between the lines.

i am not sure i know how to decrease a font’s weight from the default . . . actually much of what is stated on that blog is pretty easy to do in MS Word, but not as easy on a website. but, at least that’s a guide to try and figure out.

i am not arguing that one style is better than another; rather, i am just noting that many tools we use these days have various themes that can be turned on and off and installed, etc. why not provide your users with some options for the theme that they most prefer? i’ll have to check through the literature to see whether i am off-base on this thinking.

Tags: web design, TextMate, typography, background, readability