Popular design guides are responsible for plague of grey type

No, not really. Not when there are other ways to accomplish the same thing without sacrificing readability.

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The main body text of this article on boingboing is #333333, which is a dark grey, not a black.

Practice it as thou preacheth it.

Personally, I like grey text, but I have no vision problems, and am therefore sheltered from the issues.

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I don’t understand what the problem is. This is perfectly readable.

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l̡͚o̘͔͓͕̪͠ḷ̱͔̱͚̭̫w͎̹̰͢u̯̗t͓̙̺͟?̱̲̫̠

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Fuligin.

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In mixing music, it’s not considered final until it’s been tested on iPod headphones and a car stereo- Not just expensive studio monitors.

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Back in the sixties, that would have been the AM radio in a Mustang convertible, cruising down the freeway.

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This will not surprise you, but there some designers who really don’t consider text except as blocks of randomly patterned colour. It’s partly a result of designing when you have no idea what the text is going to be, I think, but even on one-off projects, they seem to make a habit of not actually treating text as something to be read.

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Yes, modern tv productions suffer from this problem a lot - they forget to watch the show in a real living room without expensive speakers and with people moving about (and, worse, talking) at the same time.
And then they are surprised when people complain that you can’t hear the dialogue any more…

(Of course, there was also that Dark Knight trailer kerfuffle when people complained about not being able to hear dialogue because they were watching a cinema mix on YouTube.)

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I just wish TV ads were normalized with the show. I know the FCC setup a rule about that a few years ago, but I don’t think it actually made a difference, due to inane measurement standards in the rule.

The ads should not clip my speakers. They shouldn’t be louder than the top of the show’s dynamic range. And really, they shouldn’t be on cable tv that I pay for.

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Join the contrast rebellion.

http://contrastrebellion.com

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Yes, praise be to David Carson!

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No, they’ll be second after the legions of coders who love to make text on the web too fucking small to read unless you have rabbit vision.

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Can we talk about Wired magazine (print), too? Between the gloss on the page, the size of the text and the low-contrast color, I feel every bit of my 51 years.

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Ignoring the side effects of the Evil I used to fix this, I’m surprised to say I agree.

If they’re using it on an OLED device, it’s probably not an issue. Anything with a proper traditional backlight will tend to give me a headache after awhile.

*yoink* I’m going to be borrowing your link. I wish they hadn’t committed literally every other recent website sin though. :person_with_pouting_face:

Especially the ones who code the font size in pt or px instead of em. D:

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The body of the rant is associated with an alpha of less than one. This has the effect of rendering it in grey type.

body { font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI", Roboto, Oxygen, Ubuntu, Cantarell, "Open Sans", "Helvetica Neue", sans-serif; letter-spacing: 0; font-weight: 400; font-style: normal; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; -moz-font-feature-settings: "liga" on; color: rgba(0, 0, 0, .8); font-size: 18px; line-height: 1.4 }

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Words look Perfect that way.

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#Green on Black or GTFO!!!

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you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike

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Don’t forget the super-villains in training who make their sites unzoomable on mobile devices. Jeff Atwood and Discourse, I am looking at you.

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