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What Font Color Is Best For Eyes?
juraj writes "What font color and what background is best for the eyes, when you work for a long time? I have found various contradictory recommendations and I wonder if you know about any medical studies on this topic."
Yellow on red seems like a very popular high contrast color combination for several years.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Background :#FFFFFF
Text: #FFFF00
You are now manually breathing.
Puse, turd brown, and neon pink faded together all 90s like.
I've been saying this for years, but no-one's paying attention, apparently...
When you work with computers for long periods of time, the colour of the font is nothing compared with taking regular breaks. Look out the window. Go for a walk. Make some tea. Bump up the font size. Get a bigger monitor and put it further away.
You are focusing on a tiny, tiny, tiny piece of the problem. There are almost certainly a ton of ways in which you could reduce eyestrain by gigantic amounts in comparison without bothering with something as trivial as font colour.
I always found blue on black to be relatively painless in very low light conditions.
First post?
Like my porn, it's black on white.
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
red text on a black background. I guarantee it.
Black background; font in black.
You know what? Just turn the monitor off and go look at something with depth-of-field.
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Once you go black you never go back.
Sounds like a most excellent survey topic! Old school green or amber on a black background rule...
I'm a big fan of black on white.
I find a black background with white or green text easiest on my eyes.
Brightness is the best control for eye strain. I usually lower the brightness to it's minimum and adjust the contrast accordingly. Less light lowers the strain to me.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Wrapped in the all-to-important BLINK and MARQUEE tags.
1995 www ftw.
Yellow, becuase your eye is built to see the light of the sun ( same spectrical response ...), and blue is the complementry color, its the best combination!
Save your eyes and your wrists. I vote strongly for "take a walk", especially this time of year when it's starting to get nice and warm outside. It certainly helps me collect my thoughts, and it's a bit of exercise.
A specific background and color? That's gay. I like the internet the way it is right now: every site has a different color combination. If I had to look at the same one the entire time because some science dudes said it was good for my eyes, I would perform a death ray attack on them.
Like here.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
But I find that Slashdot's color scheme is the easiest on my eyes.... aside from the large blinking ads every once in a while.
Hey! Look a Distraction!
Green on Black
Green is right in the middle of our visible spectrum which makes it the easiest for our eyes to pick up.
As for which is healthiest for the eyes, probably listening to an audio-book version of the same text...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
There are so many variables to this.
- What medium are we referring to? CRT monitor, LCD monitor, printed matt page, Hi-gloss paper?
- How much ambient light is there?
- What type of ambient light is there? Incandescent, fluorescent, halogen...?
- What is 'a long time'?
- Who are we talking about? A 7 year old child, a 30 year old office worker, a 50 year old proof reader...?
Answer those questions and we won't all be shooting in the dark.The Mothership
I use black on green but I have a specific problem with my eyes (the name of which I cannot remember).
I have been told that it basically comes down to contrast. If you have too higher contrast then it is hard to read and the highest contrast for your eyes is meant to be black on yellow which I personally find nearly impossible to read.
Black on light gray works well for me.
Black is, of course, easy on the eyes, and Red does not effect your night vision, so I imagine this is the best combination. I have tried it, and I really like it.
i find bright red letters on a bright blue background to be quite soothing. try it sometime, i promise you will thank me
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't know about any medical or scientific studies, but I'd say that moderation is the best approach! Not too bright or too dark, colors that aren't too close to each other, etc.
Of course, the exception to all that is good old black on white.
What wouldn't Jesus do?!
Personally I prefer a black background, large (14+ point) bold font, and syntax coloring with every color of the rainbow above #999999. The colors and contrast help keep my eyes interested on the average 11+ hours per day in front of the (LCD only) screen. The black background helps prevent eyestrain.
... then shake the monitor.
What is "best" will clearly depend upon what criteria you consider. Are you talking about a combination that is teh least likely to lead to damage to the eyes, the combination which causes least pain while reading, or the combination that is most comfortable? Does psychological factors count? Is your userbase young, old, mixed? I would imagine the answer could differ depending on these cases.
The only thing I can tell for certain is that the claim that looking at black on white text on a screen is like starring into a light bulb is complete nonsense, and it is very easily confirmed that the two are nowhere near the same by simply looking into a light bulb ( thou it is probably best to limit such experiments in order not to damage your eyes ). While your pupils can somewhat adjust for the incoming light, starring into a light bulb at short distance will almost certainly overwhelm your eyes with light, while looking at the computer screen does not.
The fact that a computer screen emits light does not in itself mean it will be "brighter" than a paper. It can as an example be very difficult to read some LCD screens outdoors because the relatively faint light they emit is completely drowned by bright sunlight reflected off it's surface. Now, while it may or may not be true that it is "not good" to have all light coming from only one place in front of you (which would appears to suggest having a lit computer screen in a dark room is bad ), this could be easily avoided by simply adjusting the surrounding illumination and screen brightness, and I find it very doubtful that there is much a web designer can do to optimise his webpage for every single situation since users will change the brightness and contrast of their monitors.
As a pure guess, I would imagine that weather your color scheme is familiar, if your font is large enough, and the reader's "taste" has a much greater impact than most physiological effects, and thus I would recommend a black on white color scheme with a clear simple font of sufficient size. Most people find it acceptable, and there is as far as I know little evidence that it should be troublesome.
The human eye is naturally lazy, and likes to look at things that do not cause it to send strong signals. To that end, a black background is essential for "easy on the eyes" formatting. From there, pretty much any light colour can be use for the text.
When I was in uni, I used to buy special black paper "visual arts diaries" and write my class notes using a gold, silver, bronze, or plain white ink pen. This had the effect of making my pretty poor handwriting easier to read for most people, and also reducing the effects of my dyslexia; I would make less errors like inverting a series of numbers as I wrote them down and the like.
For different working environment, e.g. with different "general background" color/brightness, you may need different color combination.
Well, nothing could prevent the eyes' fatigue if you keep on looking at the screen too long.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Depends on the viewers eyes and the sex of the reader men like black and white-women like pinks and soft colors. Animals don't matter they are generally color blind and don't use computers too much. Hilarious Pictures In Color
IMNAE, but it seems to depend on whether you are using a CRT or an LCD.
If you are using a CRT, Bright green text on black background seems best - You want a dark background to lessen the flicker, and the green gives you the best contrast.
However, you also want to minimize the contrast of the screen with the background (i.e. the wall). LCD's have no flicker, so an off white with a slightly off black may be best...
On the other hand, maybe with a LCD, white background and black text is best.
I've been wanting to know the answer to this question for a long time, and from my internet research, the above is the best I can find.
The parent is correct. Calibration of a monitor can help nicely too as described in this post: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21627&cid=2302809 as slashdot covered this exact topic quite a lont time ago: http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/09/14/1516207
meep
...because none of us have RTFA - as there isn't one.
I have found various contradictory recommendations...Err, that's nice. Where's the links?
The Mothership
I like darkslategrey background and wheat foreground. It used to be the default in emacs-x11 years ago. I have since adopted that for most of my text editors. Also, for terminal I prefer phosphorus green on black background. Both of these are pretty easy on my eyes. Equally important for me is the terminal fort and the text editor font. After years of experimentation, I have settled on the Proggy programming fonts. They are perfect for me.
I live in emacs. These are the settings I use.
(background-color . "grey20")
(foreground-color . "Wheat")
(cursor-color . "Beige")
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I'll chime in as a physician.
:p
I always wondered in medical school what causes eyestrain -- your mom probably told you "don't read in poor light," but since the photons are easily sufficient to give an image on your retina, this didn't make sense to me.
It turns out that your eye muscles have a difficult time obtaining a rapid and precise focus with poor light, which gives less contrasts on the edges that are detected for sharp focus. In low light conditions, the eye muscles are rapidly focusing back and forth, and these micro-contractions can fatigue them similar to the other large muscles of your body. As an analogy, imagine walking on level ground versus on a balance beam. You are constantly contracting different adjustment muscles to walk on a balance beam, using more energy and promoting fatigue.
So, in answer to your question, you would want a high-contrast color scheme to make it easy for your eyes to focus on the letters. "Duh," I hear you say.
Next, I would recommend minimizing the difference in brightness between your monitor and the outside environment and its background. That is, in a dark office have a dark monitor, and in a bright office, a bright one. Why? Well, same reason -- your eye muscles have to dilate your pupil every time you look away from a bright monitor to a dark monitor. More contractions / adjustments -> more fatigue. Not only that, but the high brightness contrast will give ineffective normalization of light across the eye receptors and could cause headache.
Regarding your study question -- difficult to fund, and difficult to accomplish. I guess you would have to divide several hundred office workers, and try to have them work the same hours under same conditions with different fonts, and then ask a subjective question regarding symptoms. It could be done, but I am not sure of any well-performed efforts that have addressed this question.
In summary, I would just choose contrasting colors that you like or find subjectively pleasing, and then keep the brightness on your monitor appropriate for ambient lighting. Also, don't forget to focus on the numerous other ergonomic factors on your workstation. I see a *lot* of people with bad backs from the workplace, but there are a lot of 80 year old secretaries that are not blind.
Cue the contempt for expertise from the anti-intellectual crowd now.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
My first reaction to this was "what would Edward Tufte do?"
I found the following link discussing the topic: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0000M0&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E.T.
The article discussed the best is a dark background with a bright font, but the conversation seemed to be too "environmental" as it it depends on the viewers local light setting instead of being generally independent of any local lighting.
What if I am "forced" to operate using a light/bright background and darker contrasting font?
In my opinion, experience, and local preference I have found dark grey font as easy on my eyes. It is my opinion but I do a lot of reading online with many fonts.
Just look on myspace, then do the exact oppersite.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Green on yellow, right?
I used to use Antique White on Cadet Blue. Now, its more about the color of the frames on my reading glasses.
The black background will be easy on the eyes, of course, and the red will not affect your night vision.
This was the default for some version of emacs at one time (maybe it still is), and it's been my favorite ever since.
Wheat (0xF5DEB3) text, darkslategray (0x2F4F4F) background.
There is no best set of "colors" for foreground/background, as evidenced by conflicting studies which tried to determine what that set was. Rather, what's important is contrast between the colors so that you can easily distinguish what you're seeing. So long as you maintain contrast, the choice of the specific colors is entirely subjective and up to you.
I don't think anyone can answer this absolutely, because even as people age their sensitivity degrades independently.
I've had lots of people complain they can't read my IM font because of the color, but others say it's clear as a bell.
Some people might be more sensitive to green, so yellow would stand out, but not against a light background. Others might be more red sensitive, so they can read orange on purple. But a blue sensitive person might not be able to tell much difference between the two.
I actually have different levels of green in each eye - I have trouble because some text is basically right-eye-only while the background is clear in both eyes. I can see the color fine, but it's like staring through a thin object and seeing it in both eyes, but at different places - the text is transparent.
I think the only answer is black and white, because otherwie you're depending on color sensitivity of the individual, and hoping the audience is not colorblind. Which is the foreground kinda depends on which takes more energy to produce. I prefer white text on a black background, but have never had good results on a CRT.
According to a metalink article I just dug up (http://www.metalinkltd.com/?p=91), there's a study that shows italicized green times new roman text on a yellow background showed the fastest response time and black on gray was superior to black on white. The issue is, of course, do you want your site to look like military camo...
Must be my age having started out on the Commodore Pet back in the 70's. I always use white on a black background. Then again, I mostly use VI for programming too. I just find the expanse of white with black text to be quite wearing IMHO.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
If you stare at text all day long, I've found that high contrast (black on white default) and high color saturation (brightly colored syntax highlighting) is very tiring. Turning both down a notch goes a long way for extending readability.
My terminals all use a light white on dark grey scheme, and my preferred vim color scheme has been ps_color for quite a while. (here's a useful site for visually comparing a ton of color schemes (in iframes) all at once: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/. )
Power to the Peaceful
One of the most important things that I think is overlooked too often on the "old" CRT monitors is refresh rate. Windows XP (Anyone know about Vista?) defaults to a refresh rate of 60 Hz - a rate that is well within our ability to see (and get a headache from if we're not careful). I've found that refresh rates above about 75 Hz save a significant amount of eyestrain.
Of course, with LCD monitors, this is no longer an issue.
Gray is a color, grey is a colour.
Infrared on ultraviolet
I like #cbcbcb on #0c0c0c. Not quite white on not quite black. Enough contrast to read without giving you eye-strain. And it looks nice, too :)
Since you're inverting (light text on dark bg), you should probably increase the line height around 20% beyond its normal value for further readability. Remember that color isn't everything when it comes to creating readable typography.
ColorBrewer http://www.colorbrewer.org/ has some of the answers. It will tell you about how well human eyes will be able to discern a colour scheme on various devices. It won't say much about the effect of staring at a particular colour scheme for hours.
I loved my 21" Eizo greyscale monitor. As a monochrome monitor, it had no colour gun registration issues and the text was razor sharp. It also supported 1600 x 1200 at a time when most people aspired to own a 1024 x 768 17" CRT. That is, the design and quality of the output device is also important for long term eye friendliness.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Call me old, but I've always preferred Grey lettering on a Navy background ala Word Perfect 5.1. At least when working on documents where graphics and colors are unimportant. I still keep Word configured that way to today. People accustomed to Black on White think I'm weird(er) for using it that way.
Or when I'm using a terminal, I usually setup a Green on Black color scheme, but Amber text would also be nostalgic. Even a shade of Grey on Black for an alternate nostalgia. SunOS was Black on Grey
My question(s) to you, what are you working on? Is it code? In an IDE or xterm? Do you have multi-color themes, like in an IDE? Or graphic design with lots of colors at once, in which a medium grey is usually standard? Working in a brightly lit, fluorescent bulb cubicle, an office with natural light, a basement with incandescent lights, or a dark room lit only by the neon/led/ccd bulbs of your case mods? These variables could effect your decision as much as anything else.
I think the best way for you to figure it out 'scientifically' is to come up with 5-10 combinations, try them each day at work for 1-2 weeks, and record your thoughts in a journal every hour or so. "Is this comfortable to look at? How's my eye strain? Can I reliably read what I'm doing? etc." Then pick your 2 favorites and try them each for a week straight, again making notes. Then decide on one. You can find what works for you over the long hours. I'm certain that my preference is different from yours. Obviously, you'll need to pick colors with higher contrast to each other, as Lime Green text on a Lemon Yellow background would probably be a difficult setting to get much done in.
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
Grayish green on black is the best. Black is a necessary background if you want to prevent eyestrain. Grayish green is great because it has enough contrast with black as to be quite visible, but not so bright as to hurt after extended periods of time.
;)
The bright neon green of Commodore days isn't quite the shade you want to look for, go for something that looks like a light-green gray so to speak.
I have a couple of friends that have tried my configuration and now swear by it. The added benefit of the text still being visible if you have transparency on for the background (Anybody remember E?), no matter what you have going on behind it. Well, I mean, you COULD have a background on the desktop that is comprised of the exact same shade of green, or a window open in GIMP with the same shade in backfill for that layer, but probably not. Black or white can't do that, and all the others that can are quite annoying, such as yellow or neon red. A nice, mellow, grayish shade of green is an excellent compromise between contrast and readability.
I welcome any to try it for a week and then personally message me to tell me they don't swear by it themselves. Color blind or visually challenged need not apply
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
I used two different styles but I ALWAYS keep coming back to this for my terms;
xterm -bg black -fg yellow -fn 9x15 &
xterm -bg black -fg green -fn 9x15 &
copy & paste for easy examples.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Obviously the green bg, with white in slasdots font is not effective...
the dotter asked for FONTS
id suggest :
Lucida Sans
I still like green text on a black background. I sit in front of a computer most of the day every day. I love the net but spend most of my time with plain 'ol text. Black text on a white background is just jaring to me after 'a while. Too harsh.
For flat-panel displays, black-on-white (or w/b) lets you use sub-pixel resolution, as in ClearType http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ClearType This would seem better than some other color where you couldn't use the little RGB subpixels as effectively.
When determining the "ideal" text colors for a website, one needs to take into account that many people have color blindless.
Furthermore, simply choosing contrasting colors won't work - ie. red on green is bad, red on blue is bad, etc.
With that said, some of the color combos mentioned, such as black/white or green/black often work well - easy to read by most all people.
Ron
Black text #000000 on light yellow background #FFFFDD
I know an old Fortran programmer,
who recently had me set him up with his old standard
gold-font on black
I remember several years in the 1980's when the computers I used were either
green-font on black
or
gold-font on black
I'm not sure why the old text monitors almost always had a black background.
For things like desks, I've read that
white
is recommended,
perhaps so your eyes can more easily wander.
I usually use the default black-font on white,
partly for clarity.
For a long time, I preferred black-font on wheat background, but after a few years I found I could better see black-font on white for very small fonts, otherwise I like the subdued wheat color background.
With most backgrounds, I believe a black font
will give better resolution for small fonts.
Here's my "xterm" black-font on wheat background,
with a gumby pointer (I find this pointer obscures characters less when you click words), and many other options I use,
xterm -sb -sl 1000 -j -si -sk -mc 500 -cn -bg wheat -fg black -cr red -ms cyan -geom 100x40 -fn $font -cc 33:48,37:48,45-47:48,64:48,92:48,126:48,58:48 -xrm xterm.vt100.pointerColor:blue -xrm xterm.vt100.pointerColorBackground:yellow -xrm xterm.vt100.pointerShape:gumby
Some company has surely done research on this
-- I wonder what colors they prefer.
For xterms,
green on black
black on wheat
white on navy
cyan on black
orange on black
I use white on navy for emacs.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
All those white pixels and F's waste energy! How about #CCCC00 on #CCCCCC, or #333300 on #333333?
I've heard that reducing your background to a light grey, without sacrificing too much contrast delta with your text, is best. Or, use lightly colored background with a visually opposite color to achieve the same level of contrast. The key is that you're not staring at a lightbulb all day.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Why vt420 amber on black of course.
That font usually sends me into an epileptic seizure resulting in a day off work.
I spent hundreds of hours as a kid playing text adventure games. When Infocom switched the default display from white-on-black to white-on-blue, it made a tremendous difference.
Low-emissions monitors didn't become standard until the 90's. Before that, the wrong color combinations would really make your eyes sore.
Frotz book! Blorple cube! Ozmoo!
Rock on.
So, based on your medical expertise, you are saying if it hurts when I do X, I shouldn't do X?
I do not know of any medical studies. However human percieve color areas and color is not used for edge detection. Although it is true that there is a high density of cones (color detecting neurons) at the high focus area of the retina studies have shown that higher order processing of color is different to contrast. Contrast is use for edge detection and object boundaries. Also contrast is the biggest determination or ledgibility. Any two colors of nearly equal intensity are very difficult to read. Additionally a significant amount of reading can be done with peripheral vision as evidenced in speed reading techniques. Eyestrain is usually the result of active adjustment of the eye. People eyes will attempt to adjust for percieved imperfect focus so clear sharp edges are perferred to blurry edges. Even infant perfer sharp focus as has been shown in studies in which sucking on a pacifier could control image contrast. I also think it is no accident the black on white is the standard for printed material. Other colors are easy to produce. With full color monitor large amounts of material to be read is still mostly displayed in back on white. No one liked the green or the beatiful amber CRT's. I have been told that serif fonts are easier to read with black on white and san-serif fonts are more easily read when white on black but I have no support for this notion.
I've found pretty much instant eye relief when I switch from the default dark text on white background found on most websites to white-on-black. I can almost hear a sigh of relief from my tired eyes.
If you use the opera browser you can have this very easily by going to the preferences : content -> style options and choose the "Contrastwb.css" style.
The solution for best legibility is not just color. See the MSR paper at: http://research.microsoft.com/~jplatt/clearType/
Looks like neap is a heart doctor from reading previous posts and has shared some pretty good knowledge.
BTW, an optometrist is not a doctor and I'd bet sure not smarter than a doctor. I suggest you STFU you 'anti-intellectual' loser.
One of the first things I do on a new Windows install is change the default background color from white to grey. Most of my workmates give me shit about it (as does anyone that uses my home PC, where I have the same setup), but I find it a heap easier to stare at for hours at a time.
When I use someone else's PC with a normal white background it really stands out.
I've wanted to try a default black BG for a while (I use black for terminal/ssh sessions) but as most of my computer use now is web-based I suspect it it won't make that much difference and I'm at the mercy of web designers.
they're two traditional X11 color names (in /etc/X11/rgb.txt), corresponding to particularly nice high-relative-contrast shades of yellow and blue (midnight blue avoids the aching void of despair that a plain black background slowly instils...)
I use yellow font on blue for my putty sessions.. very comfortable on the eyes. Been doing it for over 9 years. People who walk by find it so obnoxious but after awhile it settles at least on my eyes.
There's no Freedom like UFP-dom
Switch them quickly.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Experts have said that the black text on white background that the GUI windows environments defaulted to is easier on the eyes. I dunno. I always liked defaulting to dark backgrounds, especially when noodling around on bulletin boards at night. The "blank screen" text editors have gone back to that interface. For those who haven't heard of them, the idea is to strip away all the clutter associated with the modern OS and text editors, just giving you a blank black screen with green text. Some people find the discipline of staying within such an interface very conducive to sticking in a writing groove, no IM's or emails popping up to distract, etc.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
This is great information and makes perfect sense. I have been more than impressed with my use of the Pantone huey PRO that has an ambient light sensor, sits near you monitor, and adjusts your display brightness based on the lighting around you. For my eyes, it was well worth the cost.
http://www.pantone.com/pages/products/product.aspx?pid=562&ca=2
I'm not sure if there's any statistical evidence to back this up, but I've been using "white on blueprint-blue" for the last few years.
Blueprint blue is actually Prussian Blue at RGB 00 49 83. It's a fairly smooth color on the eyes, and white text goes very well with it. You can adjust the intensity of the white down depending on your monitor to minimize eye strain.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
For programming I like white on black but the font is also important. Here's a good place for some comfortable fonts.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
You are on the right track but there is more. Yes, higher contrast is better than lower contrast. But how this works with color is complicated.
One big issue is that the eye is not perfect optically. It cannot focus all colors at the same focal plane. Just how well it does varies by individual and the optical conditions of their eyes, and the quality of corrective lenses (which usually make it worse with respect to the ability to simultaneously focus all colors).
An important factor to consider here is which color or colors the difference is at the edge being focused on. For example in the "hot dog" pattern that has been mentioned in a reply here, the difference is actually in green. If the red level of the yellow part is exactly the same as the level of the pure red part, then all the difference is in green and this is an issue of green contrast. Yellow on red like this is essentially the same as green on black ... except that the extra red light with yellow on red causes the iris to close down more than the darker green on black would.
I find blue to be the worst to focus with. That may be because my sources of blue light are not sufficiently narrow band in the spectrum. Being spread out over the spectrum, it basically comes in fuzzy. Blue is also lower in contrast.
Green (be it green on black or yellow on red or even cyan on blue) is better.
Red seems to be the best in terms of focusing a sharp defining edge. You get red contrast with red on black or yellow on green or magenta on blue.
Unfortunately, effective contrast goes down when extra light is added in other colors. So you have to find a balance trading off the sharpness of the edge vs. the contrast. I've found a good compromise in orange on dark green (the level of green in the orange is the same value as the green background). Think of the orange in a neon sign on the green felt of a pool table. Then when I need to highlight something, I shift over to pink on cyan ... basically add the same level of some blue to both the orange and the dark green.
A related issue is light quality when reading a book or newspaper. Usually we are stuck with black letters on white paper. The consideration is then what type of light. I find that incandescent light, or sunlight, works nearly best for me for long term reading. Fluorescent lighting is worse. Ironically, I find high pressure sodium vapor light is about as good as, and sometimes somewhat better than, incandescent light.
To understand this, look at the spectrum. Incandescent light has a fairly even level through all light wavelengths. This makes those black on white edges a bit fuzzy. But fluorescent light has two narrowband peaks at a red and green wavelength (the blue is broader). This can make the text edge sharper ... twice. The eye ends up with two contrast edges. I believe this increases the eyestrain by causing the focus to be constantly jumping in and out to alternate the focus on the two different edges. It's a very small adjustment, but it is there at least for me. With incandescent light, it just settles in the middle of the fuzzy range and doesn't change much. And this is affected by how much light there is, which dictates how small the iris becomes. Higher light levels with a smaller iris won't change the effect from fluorescent as much as for incandescent, since with fluorescent the two contrast edges are already rather sharp due to the two narrowband spectral peaks. But for incandescent, the high light level helps (up to the point that intensity is too stressful).
This is why I believe we still need to keep some incandescent lighting around for reading and other close/fine work for long periods of time. I get a headache when working on things I need to look at closely when doing so under fluorescent light. The onset is about 25 to 45 minutes. I don't get the headaches under incandescent. And I have verified that the flicker is not the cause. White LEDs
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yellow on Dark Blue. Especially for terminals and editors.
Jakob Neilson lists some interesting research in his book "Designing Web Usability"
http://www.useit.com/jakob/webusability/
People have mentioned high contrast, but it apparently goes deeper than that.
If reading speed matters to you, there seems to be an ordering:
* Black on White (like standard paper, and is the fastest to read)
* White on black (slightly slower, but pretty small in measurable difference)
* Other high contrast (bigish drop off from the top two, but still good)
Low contrast is just bad, period. You're asking the brain to do alot more work in separating letters from the background.
Interestingly, font also matters for reading speed. Serif would be the best (with appropriate caveats), and is probably based on the fact that much of what you typically read in english probably defaults to this font. The funkier the font, the slower people will be in character recognition.
- - Bright yellow crisp mono spaced fonts on a dark blue background. This is great for long work hours without sucking your eyes out of the sockets.
- - Bright white on dark blue. Same reasons. These two combinations, combined with white or yellow on black for highlights, make a good simple combination.
- - For low-light conditions, such as an emap in a car, go with the traditional green on black or amber on black. Amber is prettier but harder to focus on quickly when glancing. Green is definately better. The current mapping systems with bright backgrounds are only good for daytime driving. The brightness of the screen causes temporary night-blindness when glancing back and forth at night.--very dangerous--
- - For modern web and client app interfaces, good contrast without major glare is important.
- - Bright blues are pretty, but are painful to a large percent of the population when exposed over long periods. It has something to do with the monitor focal point regarding blue light. Ask an expert on this.
- - Use semi-bright backgrounds, but not glaring. Muted (not primary) pastels with a crisp font are good. Examples include "dusty" pinks/salmons or dusty greens, yellows, warm blue-grays serve as good majority backgrounds where whites (unless muted) should only be used for highlights.
- - You need to make the fonts crisp and readable. Contrast the colors without causing the "spectral blur" that make it look like a "rainbow" on the edges. It may be a cool effect, but it causes eye strain.
- - Compliment the colors with the expected environment spectrum. An office typically has cool (read cheep) fluorescent lighting and drab office colors. Use a warmer set here. For a home application, use cooler colors due to the typically warmer environment. The contrast is more appealing.
- - Just as you contrast the colors with the environment, compliment the hue and brightness. A bright area should have a bright screen to match where a low light area should have a darker interface to reduce eye strain.
Generally, it takes some practice and a lot of input. Some things are often overlooked. A good example is flashing colors, images, or fonts. Just don't do it. These cause huge eye strain and can even cause epileptic seizures. Layout, also is usually an afterthought. This was just as true back when all computers were dumb terminals attached to a mainframes. Most programmers just stink as designers. Clearly delineated layouts are ***ALMOST*** as important as the color scheme. Remember the old timers' rule of thumb. If a novice computer user who knows nothing of the business background for the application can easily explain to you what the application is for and how to use it, then, and only then, it's a good interface.light gray on black a shot of my desk top http://www.fedoraforum.org/gallery/file_4gallery/4/3/2/0/2/jvv1_original.png or http://img241.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=13374_4321_122_507lo.jpg
"I don't pitch OpenSUSE Linux to my friends, i let Microsoft do it for me
The foreground color isn't that important IMHO as long as it's _easy_ to read against the background color. The best background color for me is black as it produces less strain on my eyes. Any foreground color could be used as long as it's easy to read but I've been using green for years. It looks good too
Seems like the 'slownewsday' tag is missing from this article...or maybe it's being displayed as white-on-white somewhere.
I am thankful for 'Web Developer' extension for Firefox. Whenevr I come across a site that thinks it 'cool' to have a black background I can click the 'CSS Disable Styles', 'ALL styles' and have the site restfully readable even if not layed out as intended.
For non-CSS sites with unreadable green on dark grey or whatever I try 'Edit', 'Select All' to invert to make it readable or simply go somewhere else.
Parent is not a troll. It is, in fact, informative.
>> As an analogy, imagine walking on level ground versus on a balance beam. You are constantly contracting different adjustment muscles to walk on a balance beam, using more energy and promoting fatigue.
Except it's a bad analogy, because if you walked everywhere on a balance beam, your sense of balance would drastically improve, and your muscles would quickly get stronger and better.
suppose green on black is easier to read, as do one make a color theme where the gui (and applied to all programs word, override browser colors, notepad) is based in darker colors (black, dark gray, dark blue) and the text is lighter (green, yellow, cyan), but the os is stupid so when you try to print from word you have nice black sheets of paper with light green text, todays WYSIWYG OS and printers don't have the notions of "Color Paper" and "Text Color Paper" as example in word will be black on green but when sending to printer the OS Neutralize the "Color Paper" and change the "Text Color Paper" to black, as a friendly, ergo WYSIWYG in the new century
Ha! Seeing black-on-gray perform well vindicates my old website design, in which I imitated the Amiga 2.x color scheme. (Everyone else just called it old-fashioned, because it resembled using Mosaic or an early Netscape browser.)
On all the color displays I know, Red, Green & Blue are displaced from each other. If you want to do blue-on-black, for example, you potentially light up only one-third of the pixels -- you ignore every red & green. White on cyan? only the red pixel is on/off; it's also hideously difficult to read.
That means your font renderer doesn't have the flexibility to draw each character where it really wants to be, and the letterforms are clunkier than they ought to be. ClearType and whatever the Adobe trade name is allow the renderer to turn on the individual colors to more sharply form the edges they want. The color errors may or may not be noticeable and/or important, depending on how skinny a particular stroke is, etc. And the renderer can be fairly clever.
If it has the chance. Black on white gives it the most freedom. I believe on all devices, black on white will also support the greatest precision of characters. Given how people complain about fuzzy text in some rendering schemes, I'd allow for the maximum flexibility. This may not matter if you have a bright-enough, 1280X800 screen, on which you're displaying 80X25 style monospaced text -- effectively, something like 24 point or more. Yes, green on black would be fine if it captured the spirit of what you were doing.
I really cringed as I read many of the other partial answers and unsupported claims, but between the high contrast -- allowing your eye/mind to most quickly discern the shape -- and the higher spatial accuracy -- allowing your PC to do its best job in displaying what you want -- it's tough to beat b/w for long-term use. If that's drab, consider some off-white background that sets the mood you feel your app is compatible with.
"Inquiring Minds Want to Know!"
While you joke about red on yellow, I personally use a three color font system that is brown stokes infilled with a pale orange sitting on a white background. It's very legible as you can see in this example here
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
and use yellow on blue for highlighting.
I've gotten to the age where astigmatism and a loss of lens flexibility have necessitated the use of reading glasses. If I don't wear them, then I get a "spasm of accomodation" and my vision goes fuzzy.
To help minimize the problems, I have discovered the rules posted by neapolitan (1100101) * and I would suggest that others, as they reach 35+ do the same.
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Legge, G.E. (2007). Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision . Mahwah , NJ & London : Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0-8058-4328-0
http://vision.psych.umn.edu/groups/gellab/Categories.htm
http://www.lighthouse.org/accessibility/ for accessibility issues
There is quite a bit of literature on this question. However, badly crafted studies often turn out to be measuring preference not performance. You won't find badly crafted studies in the work of Legge, those who cite him, and those who publish in the same venues.
Your logic about the balance beam does make sense. However, contrast that with the fact that humans have no problems wandering around in the dawn and dusk and even night without much troubles and have been for mellenia. Not saying that invalidates what you say, but we certainly have adaptation in some ways for low-light circumstances. Of course, in those situations we are not generally staring at 7pt font on poor monitors.
As far as color, I remember hearing about a study done in Europe way back when (25 years ago) and the results were..... amber on black. I have since regularly used that in my DOS windows and it is very pleasing, contrast and visible. The green on black does make some sense too because our eyes are extra sensitive to green (in fact, most digital camera sensors has two green sensors for every one red and blue because of this).
Scott
For those color-blind people, the worst are red on green or purple/pink on blue. There's nothing worse than going to sit through a PowerPoint presentation where the whole thing has used red text to highlight important points, but you can't read it because you can't pick out that level of contrast between red and the background. For color-blind people it's usually a matter of color contrast and quantity - you can see red or green in big lumps, but when in smaller quantities, you just can't see it. The red laser pointer is a pain too on some green backgrounds.
The fonts in mac Leopard have gone from being pure shades of grey or pigment to polychomatic blends. Your eye reads them as a single color but the blend has a much less jagged appearance.
You can see an example here
Standing across the room and looking at the blow ups on that page I linked to two things are apparent. 1) you can't see the colors and 2) the color one looks more uniform (look at the upper part of the C) and more bold (look at the leg and curve of the R).
My guess is this. You can have more bold if you use colors because if two letters are adjacent in grey then a dark grey bold would bleed together but on these letters red is on the left and blue on the right so dark red and dark blue still have a contrast.
In the eye the ganglia are set up to sharpen edges of contrasting regions. So my guess is that this principle works for the cones as well as the rods meaning that the contrast between the red and blue separation is enhanced even if they have the same grey level.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Blue font, Black background. I found it to be the easiest on my eyes as I do a lot of reading and editing.
Tears on a river, push on a shove it don't mean much.
Apparently this is Kenny Wayne Shepperd's favourite colour scheme:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyPNLi5jy1I
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
About 10 years ago I switched my sessions to default to yellow on blue (like in Norton Commander) looked good. This was for 8 hours a day (on a CRT monitor). After a few months I started getting headaches. Then it clicked - the blue is the highest frequency colour. Switched to green on black (the no-colour) and the headaches disappeared.
Zenburn isn't in standard ViM for what I know (I never seem to have it) but I used to use it all the time. At the moment I use "desert" which is basically Zenburn without some of the flare, but for the most part the same. The only reason being I can just grab my .vimrc on any box and be up and running in something I'm familiar with.
I can vouch that using these kinds of themes makes editing quite easy on the eyes. They are not too bright, have just enough contrast to be easy to read, but not so much contrast that they are too sharp. I also have the size jacked up and a very large display, take regular breaks, do not use fluorescent lighting, use sunlight whenever possible, and do my best not to code for days. I also develop hardware and have kids, so I have plenty of opportunity to look at something other than a screen with breadboarding/prototyping/soldering/etc. or taking my kids out or playing with them. Furthermore, I take a variety of supplements (blueberry extract for example) and regularly apply mild eyedrops. I'm sure it sounds like overkill to a lot of people, but at 25 my eyesight has already started to decline and that's quite frightening to me.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...In fact, I still use yellow text on blue background for my IDEs ;-)
the real killer is the white background. Stay away from it.
I, for one, don't HAVE eyes! I was blinded by Hot Grits you insensitive Soviet Natalie Portman.
Many years ago interstate exit signs were switched to white on dark green after a lot of testing. This improved readability. Never seen this on a monitor.
An old IBM man once told me that they did extensive experiments with colors. They found that dark blue text on light yellow was the best.
find me at haszak.org
When looking for a fg/bg color combination, I will use whatever color choosing applet I have available that provides a color wheel and choose two colors that are diametrically opposed. It works well in almost all cases, and though some of the combos are butt-ugly, they all tend to be quite legible...
Don't know if it's best, but I've had good results with various colors on a darkish blue-green mix.
With syntax highlighting, the text goes well in non-obnoxious whites, light blues, light greens, yellows, oranges. I'll use black for comments (the background is still light enough to make the black easily legible), which makes it very obvious what is what (lighter colors = active code, black = comments)... very easy to do a quick visual scan of.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
ElfLord
Scott Carr
The good old bad old days of green monitors...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Real coders can read the punch cards without any printing on top.
From my experience, if you're going for sheer legibility on a computer screen it's best to minimize contrast.
This means either black text on a background in the range of #EEEEEE or dark grey text, #333333, on white. Although I think the off-white background produces less eyestrain.
The ideal would probably be a black background with maybe #DDDDDD for text. I disagree that green on black is more legible, at least not the bright, neon green of old monitors. I'm almost inclined to say that amber might be a bit better, but again, a more subdued color is better.
I've always found grey text on a blue background to be surprisingly easy to read although some blues can be a bit too intense. I think the important thing is that contrast, at least excessive contrast is minimized.
And another very useful thing to enhance legibility is to increase font size. I understand the desire to try to fit as much on the screen as possible, but 18pt to 20pt type would go a long way to maximizing legibility. That in and of itself enhances legibility to the point of almost being comparable to reading a printed page.
Dark Blue/Navy background with white/light grey text or the inverse, dark blue on light grey. its not really pretty (i guess to some peoples tastes) but it isn't high contrast and you won't get headaches looking at it.
Turn off antialiasing. (sometimes called "cleartype"). AA-fonts are "blurry" because they try to make the curves smoother than is actually possible with the native resolution. The resulting grey edges appear "out of focus" and give eye-strain. In comparison, non-aa fonts may look slightly less aesthetic, but are far easier to read. Sub-pixel rendering is also bad: it gives colour-fringes.
Then, set the brightness down a little. (I also prefer a very pale yellow background to a white one). Also, sit further back, and use a larger font: focusing too close makes the eye-muscles tired, as well as "stressing" the lens.
Personally, I bought 2 x 20" 1600x1200 LCDs 4 years ago for this very reason. It cost nearly $2500 back then, but I was ruining my eyesight being hunched over a laptop.
On Linux, disable all antialising (except for headline fonts > 15pt); disable sub-pixel rendering; enable full hinting, and choose a font designed to be hinted rather than antialiased: my favourites are MS Tahoma, and Terminus. To make hinting work properly, you have to enable the bytecode interpreter in freetype: Debian/Ubuntu do this by default; Mandriva requires the PLF version of libfreetype, because some unhelpful people have a software-patent on it.
Dude, it's just sub-pixel rendering. In the Windows world they call it "ClearType" or something like that. And it only works for LCDs, because their color pixels are spatially separated.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
After all... the banners all over Slashdot are using the very theme proposed!
Text - background polarity affects performance irrespective of ambient illumination and colour contrast.
and
A study of reading time and viewers' preferences for a variety of combinations of character-background chromaticity for small traditional Chinese characters.
but don't let me do all your clicking for you:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=legibility+of+color+combinations+on+screen&spell=1
Green on black. If it's good enough for the Matrix, it's surely good enough for the likes of YOU, coppertop.
Instead of relying on anecdotes about personal taste, why not look at the user's preferences and use THAT?
I'll start the ball rolling: On Windows it's "GetSysColor()"...
PS: What really makes eyes hurt is constant switching between different light levels and color schemes. If your app is different than every other app on a user's machine then you'll cause eye strain no matter how "correct" your color scheme is.
No sig today...
The "subpixel" antialiasing is the first thing I remove, it is horrible. I sometimes remove the antialising as it with some fonts(? font systems?) blurs too much.
Black on grey. Always black (or white) on mid to light grey (or colours thereabouts). The old Amiga used this scheme for its interface and it's not hard to see why.
You get good text/bg contrast, but pictures white and text with white in stand out much better. If you have a white background, you can't get any 'whiter', so you're losing lots of contrast possibilities. (see website below for how good it looks)
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
If you read the follow up you'll see that that is not a feature of Leopard, but the result of sub-pixel rendering. It's a technique for making text look better on LCDs.
Steve Gibson has an interesting article on it here:
http://www.grc.com/ct/ctwhat.htm
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Brightness per. se. doesn't cause eyestrain. Eyestrain is caused by constant *changes* to brightness.
Match your monitor to its surroundings. I prefer it a little bit brighter than the rest of the room (so that my eyes relax a little bit when I look away).
No sig today...
My favorite, which I've used for years, is mint-green text (#x88FF88) on a dark blue background (#000060). I find it much more relaxing than green on black, for instance.
Black on white is the pits; I hate it. Of course, you can't get away from it these days. This is maybe the only thing I curse Xerox PARC for.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Maddox got it right. Large light fonts on a dark background are pleasant even in the poor lightning.
Please read computer graphics related books (Newman and Sproull, Foley and Van Dam) for more information. I found "Human Aspects of CAD" by Majchrzak, Chang, Barfield, etc. to be a useful source. They quote some studies done on this topic. The recommended color schemes for easiest reading are yellow (foreground) on black (background) when using Computer/TV Screen (CRT) or use white-on-black. This is when you need to read a lot of text. Now that LCDs are dominant, a fresh look needs to be taken on these color schemes. For reading on paper, black-on-white or black on any light background (cream, light gray, pastel shades). For drawing attention of the reader, red on any background is used.
-- Raj
I thought low contrast is best for Dyslexic slanted minds due to the link to Mirs whatever it is syndrone where black on white fonts go fuzzy.
Although I don't get fuzziness I find low contrast helps me read.
So my favorite is Black on light Yellow.
Hope this helps
A blog I run for the wealth
If you're a vim user, I recommend taking a look at the wombat colorscheme. The font "Consolas" is also a great addition to this setup, as shown in the screenshots of the colorscheme here: http://dengmao.wordpress.com/2007/01/22/vim-color-scheme-wombat/
According to this study, green on yellow is the best color scheme in the most conditions.
Although the study is kinda dated, I believe it still applies.
This is Biology. We do have 3 kinds of cones with very specific respones curves.
There might be theory as to how the signals are processed in the optic nerves, but we definitely do not have cones for 'channels'
Can't go past amber. Lode Runner on Amber Monitor Apple ][+ was the clearest and best for my eyes. In fact all text and mono graphics. /.
I hate white backgrounds as other posts have pointed out. This development was Apple's fault when they introduced the first Mac.
The concept developed from WYSIWYG and DTP with white representing a blank sheet of paper. It caught on unfortunately and now we're plagued with it everywhere. Even on
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
There have been countless studies done on this for airplane pilots. Pilots spend thousands of hours looking at screens. Orange-Red on black was proven the easiest on the eyes especially in a dark environment.
The amount of contrast between the text and the background has to be right. Unfortunatly not all monitors have the same contrast. On most modern monitors white on black or black on white is to much contrast so a dark gray on white or light gray on black works very well in most cases. On some cheap gear you might need the full black white contrast. Especially in a very light room.
Do not use contrasting colors for the for- and background only use a difference in brightness. The worst possible combination is red and blue because the difference in diffraction your eye is not capable of seeing them both sharp at the same time. Use colours that are close together on the rainbow. Also avoid purple because it is made by mixing red and blue which causes the same problem.
Especially on CRT's when flickering can be a problem a dark background tends to be less tiring on the eyes because a dark backgrounds flickers less.
Everyone is different. If you are interested for yourself, try various combinations and see what works best for YOU. A generalization fails due to the ambient lighting in any room having differing spectrum as well as everyone being a bit different.
If the colors are for use by other people, you should allow for the person to select a color scheme. My color blind friend was very happy when he found out that he could substitute colors in one program and then actually see what was written. With his color blindness, the defaults amounted to dark gray on black - and with the reflections on the screen....
So not only is this news post not "science", but it's a dupe, too.
Slightly dark orange/orange on black.
It sharp, and causes least of eyestrain when i work with massives of text(e.g. reading pages of forums).
I used green on black before, but its less sharp and requires exact brightness adjustments(green luminance) to work.
I use green on black for my consoles and programming because I never sleep and it's easier on my eyes.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Results of an actual study: In my Dad's old proof reading book (so we are talking about paper rather than screen), I remember a list in order from most to least favoured schemes in terms of eye strain, legibility etc. 1. Black on Yellow 2. Black on White ....can't remember the rest.
I find having blue eyes means you can read any font.
Artificial intelligence is the study of how to make real computers act like the ones in the movies.
It's the first thing i turn off when it's on. Fortunately most distributors turn it off nowadays.
Try Navy(Blue) for background and Gold for text color
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X11_color_names
You have multi-variable equation that you need to optimize:
:)
1. contrast
- In order to improve legibility of letter forms and fast identification of words, you should aim for a high luminosity contrast (think b&w contrast). 70% seems to be a rough rule of thumb as a decent minimum, but this depends on illumination, light source, etc.
2. chromatic aberration
- The lens of the eye will refract different wavelength light differently. This means that a deep blue light will have a different focus point than a deep red light. Again, this means that a deep red text on deep blue background (or vice versa) will cause your eye to try and re-focus between the text and the background, causing blurriness of text and eye strain. Not recommended.
3. color vision deficiency
- the red/green, yellow/blue deficiencies are easiest to avoid. Just don't pick those combinations. Anomalous trichromatism is more difficult to take into account as people can have quite widely varying deficiencies in their colour discrimination ability. A basic rule of thumb is that you should also be able to tell the colours apart from luminosity alone (change your image to grey scale and look for contrast again). Avoid primaries, secondaries and tertiaries that are close together.
4. aesthetics
- Well this is the big one, and I won't touch it with a ten foot pole
Have you ever tried to hold a camcorder to your LCD while you adjust the brightness? -- You would notice that streaks of colour and flicker increases as you reduce the brightness which can contribute to bad eye sight - what you should do instead is increase the brightness and use your display adaptor controls to reduce the brightness.
Sure this would reduce your contrast ratio, but save your eyes.
See this page for flicker details for those nice expensive 2408WFP monitors: http://monitortest.blogspot.com/
Some relevant links - Horrible plug, but at least there are no ads.
Thanks for that comment, it makes perfect sense!
I use for comments a dark green. Keywords I use a light blue. Regular text I use a grey. All on black background. My eyes get tired reading web sites all the time, I hate the white on black junk. I'm not sure why I came up with the sceam I have, but that is what I found works. I tried the darker blue, but was to dark on the black background. As the light blue is only keywords, they stand out like a sore thumb, but that is what I wanted. If I am just reading things, I would like a green on black as seams to be popular here. My bigest complaint where I work, I can't change things like that on the computer I use. Bad IT, don't let me change my colors to be more pleasing.
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. - Albert Einstein
i did a study about technology for older people. it revealed that black on light yellow was best to read.
Sub-pixel antialiasing might look sharper, but it'll always feel a bit out of place. I don't think it's easier to read. If you want bolder fonts, make them bolder, it's just that simple. If anything, sub-pixel precision is going to make them thinner. And not that it's an iFeature for iDigital iStylists only; FreeType and even Windows also support that.
Most font designers enjoy looking at bug legs on a screen, but I don't, so my fonts are personal modifications of popular fonts to make them bolder. (And yes, OMG, I have modified them which may be a violation of font designers' licenses! Fuck them!)
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
Light blue on dark blue, it makes me feel young again (I miss my C64)
Blazing Spiders
I recommend Menomena's website, here, for any font or color scheme related inspiration.
Here's another webpage that uses color very efficiently to transport an important message link
I think people could do worse than to take a lesson from the mighty Kibo
This more or less agrees with my (one-sample) experiences. Since I'm a consultant, I do most of my work on others machines and so I usually do not change any theming settings on the PCs I work on.
;)
I have found that when I have to work in a bright sunlit room, I always have fatigued eyes after a days work (which does not manifest itself as a headache, but as reduced vision - very nice when you still have to drive 50km back home), regardless of the brightness settings of the monitor. However, when the monitor brightness meets the brightness of the room it does have a noticable effect on short-term eyestrain.
But in light or dark rooms alike, I hate the big chunk of white on the screen. I have found that I read webpages most easily (and I read/code a lot of APIs) in white-on-blue, also known as selected text.
Basically, whenever I have to read a large piece of text on-screen, my (by now almost instinctive) reaction is to hit ctrl-a. It immediately reduces eyestrain, and by selecting text with the mouse before scrolling it also serves as a helpful way of bookmarking my last-read sectence.
(case-in-point: I also hit ctrl-a before proofreading this post
not white on a blue, I have a panic attack every time I see this combination because I always think I got a BSOD.
I have an eye condition known as Kerataconus, where due to it's thinning, my cornea bulges in a conic shape. This is understood to be a genetic condition, but research to identify which genes are involved is still ongoing. In practice this means I can have trouble reading fine detail, and while it isn't constant (near detail, by which I mean 10cm away) is much easier than far detail, even given relative scaling) it can vary in severity over time.
Unfortunately there are only three ways of dealing with this:
- the ever popular ignore it, just try to adapt with the vision you have
- Get contact lenses. And by this I mean hard, expensive £70/eye lenses.
- Get corneal grafts, for which there's a shortage of donors, although genetics aren't actually that important in this case
Despite this condition I'm currently making a good living as a Unix programmer....... and today's pet project has
This is because in a dark room, or at night the screen is bright white like the sun, and the rest of the room/desk is dark, the wide field of vision is very contrasting and thats what i hate and also the fact that it lights up the room like an alien landing.
I wish more websites or at least firefox offered a 'inverse view' or reverse white/black in all objects. Maybe they should also offer a colour blind option too so that it can mod the hue.
Comon slashdot, give us a retro green on black techy matrix view.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Good answer.
I have also thought a lot about the different conditions I use mye computer in. During bright daylight I'll cranck up the contrast to max, because of the light surroundings. If I use the computer in a room without light, during nighttime I really feel for using a high contrast scheme because the normally white background is to bright and almost "hit" me in the eyes, just like Neapolitan explains.
As I mostly work with reports in a Windows environment I have found no way of chaning the different colorschemes "in one click". I allways have to do it the "hard" way. Is there any possibility to force Firefox, Opera or IE to change the background color on a webpage from white to black and the font color to green/white?
The ideal soulution would be to have a "daymode" and "nightmode" for the font and background colors in all application, that could be changed at the press of ONE button.
For dark web browsing, install the Web developer toolbar. Select Disable->Page colors.
In the Firefox preferences: Content->Colors, you can set the default background and text colors.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60
PS: If you use GNOME, Firefox will reuse the GNOME color scheme, so set it to e.g. "High contrast inverse".
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
High contrast is a must, okay, that's obvious - muscle fatigue.
But then comes in retina fatigue - which occurs from bright light[1]. And to minimize that you want to minimize the amount of light falling on the retina. So dark background, bright letters and dark surroundings.
Now one thing more, if you make the letters white, they hit your retina with full power, tiring/hurting it. If you make them less white, grey, your primary source of vision data, the rod cells (monochrome) are underused, and all cones are still used. So better switch to a single color, other than blue (at which we suck). Anything from green, through yellow, to red (though red is not preferred for psychological reasons - 'alarming'.)
Thus: green or amber monitors.
[1] actually retina DOES tire, and does it VERY fast - some 2 seconds... but eyes make micro-movements rapidly so no point of your eye is lit with the same light as the remainder. That's where a trick comes from, to make objects appear brighter than they are. Make a square of #FFFFFF, okay, it's white. Overlay it with 10% opacity 50px range gaussian blur of self, you added a corona, it still looks fake, you'd understand the 'metaphor' in a comic book, but you perceive it just as bright. But add some 5-10px radial gradient groove down to #F5F5F5 just inside its edges, and suddenly you perceive it as an incadescent, blinding source of light.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
"In low light conditions, the eye muscles are rapidly focusing back and forth, and these micro-contractions can fatigue them similar to the other large muscles of your body."
"So, in answer to your question, you would want a high-contrast color scheme to make it easy for your eyes to focus on the letters. "Duh," I hear you say."
Low light and low contrast are not the same thing. Also, eye muscle movement isn't the only thing that effects eyestrain. I agree with some of the things you are saying but it seems like you have just jumbled some things together.
For my eyes, black on black is the best combination. But from time to time my eyes could also do with a gentle peach colored pastel tone with the faintest hue of light forest green on a gentle peach colored pastel tone with the faintest hue of light forest green. Not that this is good for reading, though. But that wasn't the question, right?
And it was posted just after 9/11!
Anyone know of it? I am using the Gruber Dark color scheme with bbcolors (see here), which is nice but a bit too much contrast. Has anyone done a zenburn scheme for bbcolors?
... if black on white hurts your eyes, there's probably something else wrong there too. Not saying that black on white is optimal anyway, but it shouldn't be enough by itself to give you a headache or tire your eyes.
It generally boils down to: IMHO most people I've seen using computers are doing it wrong for their eyes.
For starters make sure you use a large enough, and clear enough, font so you don't have to squint. If you absolutely need 80 lines on the screen when editing sources, that's usually your clue that there's something wrong with your programming style (and I suspect for some people the short term memory too.) You shouldn't have methods that run over that many lines, unless they're truly trivial stuff. (Like, say, a long switch statement where each line does no more than delegate to a method of its own. Arguably there are better ways there too, but I don't find it to be the end of the world either.)
IDE's also offer a lot of tools to find the method you need, when you need it, and/or collaps/expand blocks so the don't take up screen estate when you don't need them. There's also stuff like showing you the parameters anyway, so you don't have to have a second window in which you look for the parameters to that method. And really lots of other stuff. Use those instead of cramming the absolute maximum lines of text on the screen.
When I see a couple of co-workers squinting at their 6 point Illegible Roman font in VI and doing greps manually in another illegible tiled window, heh, I'm just itching to tell them to move out of the stone age already. We even discovered this funky thing called the "wheel" in the meantime, ya know?
Clean your monitor regularly, especially if it's a CRT. CRT's have thick glass, and your eyes end up focusing back and forth between the dirt on the front side of it, and the letters on the back side of it. But it's distracting and tiresome on TFTs too. And if you need to squint because you're at the point of "is that a 'm' or a 'rn'? Or is it 'rh' behind that speck?" it's long overdue for a cleaning.
Do turn your contrast up, but turn your brightness down to a comfortable level. The monitor is not supposed to be an AA searchlight. Staring into very bright stuff, especially in a dark room, _is_ tiresome. Here especially the TFT's are the biggest offenders. The manufacturers got stuck on bragging about the brightness of their monitors, as if that's something good, and pre-set them to insanely bright levels. Turn that down to where you can live with the white for hours.
And it will be even more important when you have to focus on stuff that's the other way around: white on black. (Some websites love that scheme, for example.) On an ultra-bright monitors that will mean focusing on a mostly black screen, so your pupils are wide open, but some pieces of retina are getting to see some really bright letters. It's a recipe for a headache.
As a side-note, I'm genuinely surprised at how many people do the exact opposite. I've seen too many monitors which are turned to abysmal contrast, and as bright as halogen headlights. I mean, WTF? Some things are barely legible in that configuration.
Ok, so maybe it's good for PC games, where the average dev seems to think that every fucking thing must happen in nearly complete darkness. 'Cause, you know, we have 32 bit colours so we can display all the gamut of "black", "really dark", "dark grey", "room with a broken lightbulb" and "grey stone on a moonless night". But the brightness settings where you see in near dark in games, suck for work or even reading in a browser. If you use the same monitor for games, consider turning up the brightness or gamma up in those, instead of turning the monitor's brightness all the way to the right.
If you're stuck with a CRT, make sure it's a good one and properly tuned. Staring into an unfocused image, especially with small unfocused fonts, is a recipe for a headache.
Again, for CRT users, just because everything idiotically defaults to 60 Hz, is no
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Do you have a condensed bold Courier? I hate its squareness, it's like an 8-bit computer.
I guess it's not required since Microsoft created Consolas, which ain't a bad font all told.
Doctor, doctor, I've hurt my arm in several places.
So don't go back to those places!
Perhaps I am more sensitive to the use of color artifacts having used the Tandy/Radio Shack Color Computer 2 as one of my first computers, but I find the use of colors in font blending both noticeable and somewhat jarring to my senses. I am familiar with color dynamics on light projecting displays as well as on printed media and while such a strategy may work for the majority of viewers, I see these measures as nothing more than compensation for having too low image display density.
I use different schemes, but for IRC i use black and dark grey on very light yellow (the icky yellow from some root terms in linuxes (suse 7 and such)) it's not as bright as white, and not as dark as black. and with my current theme in windows thats preferable
Conceptually, I like a white (or just a bit off white) background. Practically, I've not yet owned a computer monitor that wasn't back-lighted, which makes any background color (other than black) way too much like staring at a light bulb. Since I write code all day, I find it most comfortable to use many colors on a black background for my primary tools. Secondary tools, like word processors, help systems, web browsers, etc. still have the default bright background. I find that the contrast actually helps with my particular vision problems (difficulty with contrast and focus). I also have a window beside my screens and look out often to focus on distant objects in the Florida sun (more brightness to contend with).
Within the code editing environment, I (and my co-workers, we took a vote) seem to be able to distinguish more color variations with a black background than with white. Since we like syntax coloring, this allows more different colors for different syntactical elements. But there's nothing what-so-ever scientific about my study. Just twenty-four years of experience.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Back when RedHat still came on floppies, someone developer left their .emacs in the distro. It had some very nice colour combinations.
Over time I have come to realise that they mimic an old chalk board.
set-background-color DarkSlateGrey
set-foreground-color Wheat
set-cursor-color Orchid
Variations of background colour that work nicely and give you distinct consoles/editors:
DarkSlateBlue
Sorry I would have more, but they're on my home PC and I'm at work at the moment. If you're interested reply to this thread, i'll post them in the evening.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Rule Number One, if you're going to be looking at it for long hours, is to use the darker color as background and the lighter color as foreground.
Rule Number Two, if you're going to be looking at it for long hours, is to go with a medium contrast. Bright white on black is too sharp, but don't go with colors so similar you have to squint, either.
Green on black, like old Apple monitors, isn't too bad. Amber on black, like old DEC monitors, is better,
But the _best_ combination I have found, bar none, is #FFE6BC on #294D4A, wheat on dark slate green. You can look at that for sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and it doesn't hurt.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
But, this is
ps: it looks beautiful from across the room... how many actually did that haha...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Look at the topic again and tell me that this is a question of how maximum contrast can be achieved. No, we are not talking about how to make the color of the words so different they pop out of the page. We are looking for color schemes that are easy on the eyes. When working for long hours, your eyes will become fatigued, and the higher the contrast of your texts, the more fatigued your eyes will become. It is better for your eyes to view low-contrast text than it is to view high-contrast text. For that reason, I use navy on lightish blue as my color scheme.
The choice of font makes a huge difference to readability. Professor Arnold Wilkins (U. Essex,UK) has conducted extensive studies on the 'hygiene of reading'. his recommended font is Verdana with Times and Courier among the worst. (You want to avoid fonts with high autocorrelations.. where all the letters are very similiar looking and so it's difficult to keep track on the right place in the text). He also recommends using lower contrast and avoiding flicker as best you can:
"We read under light that is too bright and that flickers continually but imperceptibly, disturbing eye movements and visual search. We read text that is too small with fonts that are too striped, impairing reading speed. We read from displays that direct glare into the eyes, causing headaches. There are simple steps we can take to make our reading more hygenic."
http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/psy/people/wilkins/wilkins.html
CRT pixels do not line up precisely with their r, g, and b light emission points, at least on most CRTs. If you look at a single white pixel on a field of black through a lupe, you'll see it's composed of a number of red, green, and blue dots, not one dot for each color. Look at a different pixel, and the exact pattern will be different (shifted a little).
They use a couple of electromagnetic coils in the rear of the tube to guide an electron beam to the right point on the CRT's surface, but it is not so precise on most models (though maybe some really high end stuff for scientific work) as to be able to exactly hit specific phosphorescent spots.
This is why sub-pixel rendering works on LCDs but not CRTs (which turn on and off [or shade] specific color points digitally), because we know the exact shape and color layout of each pixel.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
Comon slashdot, everyone knows white is so fortune 500, go elite hacker style, and go green on black ,this white look is so yr2000.
Every frickin website is white background, it sucks. Its TOO COMON and main stream. ie LAME
Is startrek white, no its black, so they had the elite style years before the internet as usual they were decades ahead of time.
The white look is 100% corporate, not cool.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
On Windows font antialiasing makes fonts thinner but not on a Mac. On a Mac their goal is precision of the characters for print so the sizes and thinkness are correct although they look a little fuzzy on screen.
Time makes more converts than reason
You need a system that is extremely adaptable in all aspects and all apps, in addition you need good quality hardware like screens with good driver cards and quality cables. Our shop uses Eizo monitors of any size you request and always on DVI from Matrox cards. Personally I use dual 19" screen Kubuntu box, keeps your eyes moving and refocusing. My shells are always bright grey text on black backgrounds, sometimes transparent to see the changing backdrops, once again so I'm always moving and refocusing my eyes. The Windows box I have to have, company policy, has all the windows with black text on light grey backrounds in ALL the windows, never white background in any windows like my colleagues. I find the light grey tinting means I can stare at the Outlook and Word windows for a lot longer than many other people I work with.
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
Most OSes have a tool that you can tune the subpixel rendering. Windows has a Cleartype Tuning tool, for instance, that allows you to change it to a crisper rendering yet still retail the benefits of subpixel rendering -- or lets you pick what I would consider very blurry text (which is actually useful for users that use very large default text sizes).
I prefer black text on a white background, though I use syntax highlighting while coding.
But this is on CRT where you have decent control of brightness. LCD makers have gotten into a detrimental specification war and bigger ones often quote 400 to 500 nits brightness. When they do, they invariably don't have the control range to get under 100 nits for long term comfort.
I purchased a 500 nits 24" screen from Dell before I realized the problem. Even at minimum brightness I couldn't use the screen for more than 20 minutes. It hurt my eyes and this is from someone who spends 12-14hours a day staring at crts with no issues in the last 20 years. I now have a 17" cheapo LCD at home to go with my CRT. It is a 250 nits display and reduces to a nice comfortable level.
Is it so hard to develop two style sheets for day/night viewing as an option and use the pc local time to decide to choose which one????
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
http://www.writer2001.com/colwebcontrast.htm
I looked on PubMed Central and found this:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=226096
There's a little bit in there on computer monitors.
Regards, Non.
There is another theory that states that this has already happened.
a lot of speculation, but does ANYONE have any experimental data, where you figure out what "readible" or "usable" means, and then do an test ?
For instance, you might ask people to read an online book, or something like that, and every 20 minutes give them some sort of captcha test with decreasing font sizes; you might ask them to read a complex paragraph and then answer questions, etc..
Or, you could give people adjustable monitors and see what they do (easily adjustable monitors, so ordinary people could vary...)
I have found that dark blue fonts on a light grey background provides the optimum vieweing environment. Perhaps this started way back when I was still using Juno for email and that was their default color scheme, but I find the grey background to be sufficiently neutral (neither black nor white, both of which feel jarring to my eyes) and the dark blue has enough contrast to stand out clearly on the background.
My personal preference is white/very light-grey on a very dark grey. But since everyone perceives colors a little bit differently my guess is as good as any. I like books with slightly brownish pages and sleek dark letters, seems to tire my eyes less than bold black on pure white. If you find some common ground on how we "should" set our screens I'm ready to try it (at least for 5 minutes).
Paper isn't white naturally, nor is ink black. But there is a reason nearly everything ever has been printed in black text on white paper. Perhaps there is a difference when you switch it to a screen, but you can never go wrong with black text and a LOT of white space. I read in a design book this simple statement (apologies to the author, I can't remember who it is): black on white, red for attention.
using System.Graphics.Drawing;
public Color IdealTextColor(Color bg)
{
int nThreshold = 105;
int bgDelta = Convert.ToInt32((bg.R * 0.299) + (bg.G * 0.587) + (bg.B * 0.114));
Color foreColor = (255 - bgDelta nThreshold) ? Color.Black : Color.White;
return foreColor;
}
nuff said.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
"Cue the contempt for expertise from the anti-intellectual crowd now"
Contempt for overpaid, underworked, upperclass elitists? Now, who would go and do a thing like that?
Hi, I'm the Zenburn author. There's no reason to abandon Zenburn :)
.vimrc, you could also grab Zenburn with e.g. wget http://slinky.imukuppi.org/zenburn/zenburn.vim . Then copy it to the colors-directory, then do :colors zenburn in GVim/your .vimrc, profit, etc.
While you grab your
Have fun!
A great design/UX blog I read has a post on good use of font/text and contrast in digital display:
http://idvux.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2EB6AAF6C3AC1EBE!599.entry
ClearType (or whatever variant your OS uses) is noticably better to me even on CRT monitors, instead of the (somewhat) jagged edges on rounded characters (C, S, a, for example) the letters are nice and smooth as if I were reading them from paper.
Grey text on dark blue background, with white text for bold.
I find this very easy to read and on my laptop with glossy panel I am not distracted by the movement of my own clearly visible reflection, as I do get with a black background.
http://img182.imageshack.us/img182/5360/wordperfect51dosxi1.png
Except it doesn't really work, even on LCDs. "Cleartype" just makes your fonts more blurry and harder to read.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
It makes sense (except in texas where it is outlawed)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I use my own Lucida Console modification, in which I got rid of the ugly i and l horizontal bars, aligned +* and every other symbol properly (great for programming), and removed the horribly crappy hinting that would prevent Windows' traditional (not ClearType) renderer to display it properly in sizes below 14pt/96 dpi.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
All modern desktop OSs support subpixel rendering; but I have to say, I've always been able to see the colors to some extent, making the fonts look like they're bleeding. After some initial experimenting with different settings, I just turn it off now (on any platform I'm using).
Mango #FF9966) on black for many hours a day using a word processor.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Additionnal advice : clean your glasses.
Man, how many people tend to wear dirty glasses.
Either grease or dust, both are terrific.
Trust me, do it !
This might get lost in the shuffle but...
I've found that any site that uses stark white on black leaves terrible afterimages on my eyes when I go look another page, or general white area. Actually the afterimage starts as I'm trying to read the text, so as my eyes drift a bit the stuff gets less legible.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I utterly hate the aliasing in Linux (KDE), it's just like trying to read blurry text. How can I make the fonts look exactly like in Windows without the wrongly named ClearType ? Can I copy the ttf files over ? Is there some option to make it sharp ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Digital camera sensors have twice as many greyscale photocells with a green filter when compared to the number of photocells with red and blue filters. I wonder if the "green on black" scheme on terminals is also successful in isolating other influences for the same reason.
Readability and eyestrain are always at odds with each other. For readability purposes you want very high contrast between your foreground (text) and background colors. Obviously, white-on-black or black-on-white are the best choices for readability. The problem is over long periods of time high contrast viewing creates eye strain. This is why legal pads are yellow, for instance. The slightly lower contrast between a yellow background and a dark foreground reduces, but does not eliminate eye strain. The problem recurs at the other end of the spectrum if you have too low a contrast between your foreground and background. Your eyes strain to read the text and it makes things harder to read, period.
As far as colors go, the bottom line depends on the individual. We all see things a little differently, literally! Our visual acuity and duration to eye strain are metrics that do not necessarily apply to everyone and you really have to experiment to find out what contrast level works best for you.
The font issue is a little more defined. Proportional serif fonts (Times, Garamond, etc.) are good for print applications and are the most commonly used in printed publications. Proportional sans-serif fonts (Verdana, Arial, etc.) are best read on computer screens because of the dithering that often occurs to serif fonts. They are also easier to read on computer screens because the characters are more easily recognizable in the simpler, sans-serif form.
That's about all I can share on the subject. There are some well established guidelines, but because every human being is a little different there aren't any real hard and fast rules.
I don't know how difficult it would be to get funding. You just need someone who could put the following into a grant proposal:
1) Millions of [insert your country here] use computers.
2) Eye care cost [insert your country here]'s N bajillion* a year
3) Need to determine the long term effects on children**.
I can see where it would be in Microsoft's best interest to find this information out.
*Use a real number.
**No, it's not a 'save the children' plea. The fact is young children use computer, if there is any long term effects, it would start their.***
***One more footnote I a get the Terry Pratchett award for footnote excellence.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I've always thought that what Maddox said was best. When he was explaining why he used a large sans-serif font of middle gray on a black background.
"When I go to a web site, I WANT TO READ THE CONTENT. Trust me, that micro-font everyone uses isn't nearly as original as they think. I've chosen a black background for most of my text because it's easier on the eyes than staring at a white screen. Think about it: your monitor is not a piece of paper, no matter how hard you try to make it one. Staring at a white background while you read is like staring at a light bulb (don't believe me? Try turning off the lights next time you use a word processor). Would you stare at a light bulb for hours at a time? Not if you want to keep your vision."
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=faq
It just makes sense. A mid-level of contrast isn't difficult to make out and it's not an annoying extreme contrast (yellow on red). The black background puts out the least amount of light in your light based additive color system. Use large sans-serif fonts for easy readibility. Personally I've never used this myself for anything, but it always made sense as the best set up for eye health. Even reading back this for spell checking it seems twice as hard to look at as it did on his site.
Then you might want to use a pastel background of one color with pastel text of another color designed to be of identical total brightness. This would appear to colorblind over the shoulder onlookers as a blank screen. You can send emails that way too to be a real d*ck. The best thing to do is have a pastel background with black text, but add an important paragraph at the bottom of the message that would be invisible to the colorblind. Fscking evil.
...
Actually, ever wonder why IBM uses their distinctive blue and gray? They spent millions on research to find out what colours give what messages to people. Blue and gray are very soothing, but serious conservative business colours. Google ibm blue gray color studies for more. Sample found here:
http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/353/sectiond/jacobson.html
Unlike most of these posters, I don't have to work in terminal/vi/macs most of the live long day but when I do, I enjoy the classic green text on black or, thanks to Tiny Term, yellow text on a blue background. In Windows, I like blues. I use the Royale theme and usually try a background that isn't too busy and is either blue as well or a complimentary color. Currently I have a space background but since there is alot of black it's not too much for my eyes to focus on. In other news, this is a ridiculously long thread for a post on color schemes!
Gryphoenix
What's the magic trick on getting Zenburn to work under emacs -nw? I grabbed the zenburn.el and:
(load-library "zenburn")
(color-theme-zenburn)
But nada.
Light parchment color yellow, with darker text is good for me.
Reminds me of an old book.
VOTE!
That would be the anti-aliasing, then.
Subpixel shading + No hinting + High resolution = completely invisible font pixels & gorgeous sharp fonts on Ubuntu 8.04 - superior to anything I've seen on Windows or Mac... but it only works on relatively high resolution monitors (in my experience). So a 15" 1280x720 screen is never going to have good-looking fonts... but a 1680x1050 15" screen will (it's >2X the number of pixels).
Black on... grey. Might mix in some dark orange for headings (or my case, names)
Pickett who makes slide rules claims black on yellow. See http://www.sliderule.ca/pickett.htm and the visibility graph at http://www.sliderule.ca/piprom2.jpg
Didn't IBM do this research over a decade ago. The found a light-grey background was best at productivity and the eyes themselves. They incorporated thos colors into OS/2 2.1.
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/desktop/empty/os221.png
It sucked from a marketing perspective and they soon went to a similar color scheme as M$ was using.
Kevin
Irrational Diversions
One thing I haven't yet seen mentioned in other comments: Brightness.
Setting the brightness to max will hurt your eyes, even though for a moment you think it improves the picture.
Every piece of literature on the subject that I've read recommends setting the brightness of the screen to roughly the brightness of the room.
Makes sense once you think about it. Since you look up every now and then, or check a piece of paper, or just look over to the coffee pot - i.e. every time your eyes leave the screen, they have to adjust to the light level of the room. If that is very different from the light level of the screen, they will tire soon.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
girl on girl is best combination. What are font colors?
Note that that is only for CRTs. I use this method(also only for CRTs):
http://www.poynton.com/notes/brightness_and_contrast/index.html
Magenta, cyan, white, and black. Who needs more, you insensitive clods!
I guess that would be the high end stuff mentioned above?
I had a Trinitron-labeled 21" CRT monitor for around 5 or 6 years. Over time it got fuzzy, and even if it was initially able to use sub-pixel rendering because the gun was accurate enough, this would have stopped being true as the monitor aged.
Blue-teal on white-pink is the easiest and most effective combo for me when I do serious coding.
You can copy over the ttf files. Personally, I always want verdana for web browsing under Linux; verdana is one thing that MS haters give them credit for doing right.
Pick appropriate fonts. To me, most fonts only look good under X at certain sizes (depending on the font design, rendering engine, et cetera, et cetera). I find that the old X bitmap fonts are best in terminals (ymmv). I like helvetica for small labels. Play with whatever settings are available; things look different on CRTs and LCDs, and your settings might be optimized for the wrong type of monitor.
Konqueror has nice facilities for browsing a directory of ttf files.
Sure.
For me the best setting is "disabled". Same with XP ("cleartype disabled" or something, not on XP right now) and Linux ("best shapes").
Fortunately it is easily changeable per user as I know some people love the subpixel rendering.
Here are two small studies that may answer some of your questions.
http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/survreslts.html
"Recently, internet users assisted Dr. Lauren Scharff and student Alyson Hill of Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, with a survey designed to measure the readability of various text/background color combinations. Below is a summary of the results of this survey and a discussion of the research project which was designed to study this topic further."
"The survey of readability of different color combinations showed the following trends (see above figure). Not surprisingly, certain foreground/background color combinations were rated more highly than others."
The references cited in this article may lead you to some additional relevant information.
http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/AHNCUR.html
"Readability Of Websites With Various Foreground/Background Color Combinations, Font Types And Word Styles"
Department of Psychology
Stephen F. Austin State University 1997
"As predicted, significant main effects and interactions were found for font type, word style, and color combination. For example, plain text is consistently responded to more quickly than italicized. These main effects suggest that one can make general recommendations to screen display designers. However, the significant interactions highlight the fact that there is no one color combination, font type, or word style to use, but rather all conditions affect one another."
Sincerely,
An anti-intellectual.
Although Zaphod has already demonstrated that black buttons on a black interface with black labels and lights that illuminate black also works very well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Light wavelengths have a great impact on hue v hue legibility. The wavelength difference from blue to red is significant enough that the eye cannot focus the two colors simultaneously. So, red on blue, or reversed, combinations are the worst for normal color vision human perception. To improve legibility, color focus differences must be eliminated. The easiest way to do this is to make black or a shade of grey one of the choices. That's requirement one. The secondary requirement is to balance the contrast. While white on black has maximum contrast, the contrast is so high that edge definition can be lost as the brain tries to force an equilibrium. White text on dark colors works well, but for the best legibility Yellow on Black or Black on Yellow (and more yellow shades of orange). It isn't a coincidence that these are the colors chosen for highway warning and alert signs.
The potato it is uninformed.
Yes, the eyes like to minimize the use of optic nerve bandwidth, but that doesn't mean what you seem to think.
It means that the retina has built-in edge detection. The photoreceptors are wired to inhibit adjacent photoreceptors, so if they're seeing the same colour, it naturally get subtracted from the signal.
I.e., plain empty background doesn't cause more bandwidth use, regardless of whether it's white, black, green, pink, or anything else you can think of. A pure white screen is pretty much the minimum bandwidth scenario, _not_ the bandwidth overload one. (Though a lot of dirt on the screen might cause a bunch of extra signal there.)
Also that means that a "." costs less bandwidth than a "/" which in turn costs less than an "X".
But that's all irrelevant because:
1. If you can read the text, you already have enough bandwidth. In fact, heh, almost any text doesn't come even close to being bandwidth-capped there. A stroll through the park or watching a tabby cat run through grass, already have a lot more edges than reading this page in Slashdot.
2. That's not what causes eye strain.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
While the sensitivity of our eyes to various colors is one factor, the other is how well we can focus different colors. Our ours have the most trouble focusing blue, and deep red. Yellow to Green focus the best. Remember the days of monochrome text computer terminals (the VT52 look-a-likes)? Most had green phosphers, some had yellow.
While studying architecture I learned: 1) Black on white 2) Black on pale, pale green: old time drafting shops would use pale green lighting to give the white velum paper a bit of green cast for this reason. I use this in my browser.
Your blindingly obvious points have damaged my eyes more than a roomful of dirty, 56Hz-retrace CRTs showing 6-point type with the brightness turned all the way up over unshielded VGA cables.
Consider your audience next time. Some of us used to do our work on teletypes, for fuck's sake. Care to tell us about how we should re-ink our ribbons for maximum contrast? Which brightness of paper should we be using?
Just how long has that 80 yo been working with a computer ? even if she worked until (s)he was 70 thats 10 years ago. which would be 1998 ish. Think about this for a moment. Windows 3.1 was released in 1992. Just 5 years before (s)he retired. even if the company was very progress and had computers on the desks 5 years before that , it would only have been 10 years. And furthermore , I think that the ( at that time ) 60 year old would have been ( generally ) the last people to start using the computers.
So really your analogy is bullshit.
now
yes slash dot readers have known computers there whole lives
...and it saves you laptop battery too, as a extra free bonus (if you use the light gray as the desktop color).
"The human retina contains about 120 million rod cells and 6 million cone cells." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rods_and_cones
That's 20x more rods (the luminance detectors). So don't think color contrast as much as brightness contrast, keeping it within the extremes of your environment (so your pupil doesn't have to keep constricting).
I've read that our cones detecting blue don't register it as bright, since our atmosphere is bluer and we'd be looking through more haze. I can't find it now, but had also remember that highway signs are white on green because a study showed that was clearest.
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If you're using a CRT, consider convergence issues. You're dealing with separate electron beams to stimulate red, green, and blue phosphors. It's common for the beams not to align perfectly, resulting in fuzzy outlines of small-font symbols if you're using a color that requires more than one beam.
So then it's down to a selection among these three primaries. The human eyeball has more receptors for green than for red or blue, so green is your choice: either black text on a green background (my standard) or green text on a black background.
For a scholarly work on the subject, see http://hubel.sfasu.edu/research/AHNCUR.html
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I have. You just need to read through this thread to see how many people have no clue about what their eyes do or don't.
Consider this: Slashdot is a very mixed audience. For every great guru, there are at least two who aren't that great. There'll be people who only think they're great, people who got hired in first level tech support just because they could operate a phone and read a list (not all, but think of some of the first level support you must have called before), has-been PHBs who haven't had anything to do with technology since those teletypes you mentioned, and wannabes who think that reading Slashdot is some kind of building street cred.
Furthermore, even if you were the great expert in some domain, you're not on all. Just because you know how to use a teletype, doesn't mean you necessarily know about your eyes. The people I've mentioned who set their monitors all wrong, or leave dirt build up until you can barely see through, work in IT too. Obviously they haven't learned much about monitors.
But we also have people around whose expertise is in physics, graphics design, a few gamers, at least a few cops that mostly appear in the YRO threads, some medical doctors, a few lawyers interested in the IP threads, etc. Not everyone is an expert in the same field, briefly.
Really? Data entry clerk? Something tells me you don't have many achievements to brag about from that era, if your dose of daily jollies is trolling AC on Slashdot. Or is it just a case of "oh, how the mighty have fallen"?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I favor what seems to be the majority opinion here of light text on a dark background. Unfortunately, so much software fights my preference that often I have to give in to the naive, boring, and sub-optimal "black on white".
When I worked on a trading floor, the traders with a lot of monitors - some of them had six - with a few windows open on each, seemed to prefer light text on dark backgrounds as well _if_ the software they were using easily accomodated this.
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
This is why monitors should have the ability to adjust to ambiant light conditions. While color plays a definite role in readability, we don't have the luxury of forcing every web page to display according to our preferences. Like almost all LED based displays in radios and clocks, a sensor automatically adjusts for ambiant light to provide a clearer display.
That being said, I believe that we will never completely close the gap between illuminated and reflective vision. Reading a book in almost any light with black on white is without question the best for readablility. However the variations in display technologies will continue to evolve thereby increasing the complexity of optimal viewing conditions.
I'd say the RGB segments of each pixel are individually addressable with LCDs
That the Japanese did a small study about this during WWII and chose yellow text on a dark blue ("Navy") background.
I use this scheme on my term windows, and it seems very comfortable to my eyes.
And yet, it will probably not look worse than subpixel rendering on a LCD connected via a noisy VGA cable - let alone a LCD driven at non native resolution or even a LCD with the wrong subpixel geometry.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Steve Gibson has a demo program http://www.grc.com/ct/freeandclear.htm that shows how ClearType works. "The Genesis of these pages was Microsoft's Comdex announcement of their new breakthrough font rendering technology, dubbed 'ClearType'. This announcement gave the industry a much needed wake-up call. Although Microsoft mistakenly believed that they had discovered something new, they certainly deserve the credit for helping to bring years of prior display system research and development into the forefront of personal computing practice." Click the Tune button and use the Magnify slider to see the effects of various render modes.
Dude look up the meaning of cue?
Cue:
1 a: a signal (as a word, phrase, or bit of stage business) to a performer to begin a specific speech or action b: something serving a comparable purpose : hint
or is there some joke that you are making here? Cue can also mean 'queue' in informal english too.
>Low light and low contrast are not the same thing.
No crap, but I think he means that if you have low light levels the light can vary from, say, 0 in dark to 100 units in light, while if you increase lighting the dark areas may be 0, and light areas 10000 units, thus increasing the contrast. Think about it if really dark ultimately all contrast goes to zero. That was pretty clear to me when reading the explanation which has also been noted in this reply list.
Sirs:
I am from planet Earth, that revoles around a type N star, in the MilkyWay Galixy.
In our Galixy, type N stars ( main sequince ) emit a light power spectrum centered around
6300deg Kelvin, a light wavelength we call 'Yellow'.
White light is a broad spectrum light that has equal power on all frequencies.
The light of a N type star, of which our sun is one, is centered on the Yellow
part of the light spectrium. Remember ROYGBV. Red stars are hotter, Yellow is ours,
and Blue stars are cooler, and UV stars are the coolest!
At least that was the order of things, according to astronmetrics,
when I got my MS, and I dont think a lot has changed.
What is interesting about human eyes, is that the power RESPONSE curve,
matches our sun, as exactly as we can measure it.
Now. WHAT STAR ARE YOU FROM?
Yeah, but contrast is more than just absolute levels of light. There is also color, shape, and many other factors that effect perceived contrast. Saying it's all down to one thing isn't a very scientific way of looking at it.
I recall a phase in the mid to late 80s when many terminals were amber. They were meant to be much easier on the eyes than grenn screens. The colour was usually orange and the background sort of a dark muddy brown. It was much easier on the eyes in a poorly lit room (ie late at night or any office desk not next to a window). I know some people hated them (I had one client who used to throw up with an amber screen and get headaches, but with the green she was fine - so your mileage may vary!)
:-) It'd be great if flatscreens could cut the backlight way way down. When mine's on the whole room lights up - big waste of power it seems. The brightness controls do almost nothing (it's a 24" Samsung widescreen). I've talked to many, many others who have the same problem. (It could be my old screen had faded a bit, I admit)
:-)
I've personally tried many variations once colours became available and usually I end up with some form of black on grey, turned way down, with the "temperature" set as cold (ie as "brown") as possible, usually with muted green, grey or brown borders.
I used the same 21" Sony Trinitron at home from the mid 90s to last year at 1600x1200 at 60Hz and then changed to a top end flatscreen last year. It was a huge shock as now I can't do work at night without the light on as the screen is so bright. I have to turn the room light way up otherwise it almost hurts and I can't see a thing when I get up
Call me fussy but a rough estimate says I've been using screens for 12+hrs a day for 25 yrs or so from 30" away and I'm a bit stuck in my ways
pithy comment
Cue:
1 a: a signal (as a word, phrase, or bit of stage business) to a performer to begin a specific speech or action b: something serving a comparable purpose : hint
or is there some joke that you are making here? Cue can also mean 'queue' in informal english too. Dude!! OP is ordering an action to be taken. So, if I remember 4th grade correctly, verbs describe actions. One action a verb might describe is the forming of a line. There is also these other things we call nouns. Nouns are persons, places or things. Things like stage cues would be considered nouns. So you may have been queued up to go on stage, but you still may miss your cue. No kiddin'!! Cue can also mean 'queue' in informal english too. After decades of misuse, I'm sure it will.
Next week's lesson: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Question Mark and How to Use It, Too!!: Part I
Well as they say, doing X should feel good, if it hurts you're doing it wrong.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
red on black is easy on the eyes
When I was an IRC nublet (not so long ago compared to some), a very influential woman (well, so she claimed!) told me that green on black was the most relaxing color for long term usage.
I tried it out on the mIRCs and found that I liked the old school style and accordingly set it to the default color in IE (while not incredibly long ago, it was long enough ago) and mIRC both.
I have KVIRC on my mac set to green on black, although when I realized you could change the default colors I did, so it's a prettier green at least now.
The key is you want the least amount of brightness (black screen) so that your rods and cones have less to do, your iris can relax, whatever. And since green seems to be the largest band of "hue" that we can detect, why not?
IANAO
I've heard some claims that medium-light gray on black is the easiest to read, particularly by this guy. But I've heard it elsewhere too... so it must be true.
But in actually, it makes sense in theory. Black tends to be easier on the eyes in large quantities than white, and grey text, as apposed to white, is less dazzling.
I really should know this in and out, since I'm a video designer for a commercial TV station... and I've taken classes in visual communcation techniques, but I have yet to hear some really definitive evidence one way or the other.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
complementary or split complementary colors will always result in the highest contrast- this means purple and yellow, green and read, blue and orange, and white and black, split complementary being slight hue variations. Some Design sense will tell you that removing the more jarring colours (or reserving them for headlines, callouts etc) is best for body text. So any muted combination of those colour combinations will be most readable.
For example, the off-white on grey/greyish green body text for slashdot is an ideal colour choice. White on black is initially more visually activating, but the high contrast of black on white or vice versa would be harsh on the eyes for long term viewing.
The best situation is to have a lighter, very muted background colour, and a darker, but not overly pronounced hue for the body text. The reverse, or having more extreme colors is great for emphasis(think the headers on this forum) and getting some angst accross, but will slow down reading because a)we are used to reading dark text on light background, and b)too much color in your body copy will cause the mind to focus on the shapes and color instead of reading, eventually causing mental fatigue and confusion.
A good follow up question would be What line length, spacing and typeface/font is best? But please just take my word for it-its an exhaustive topic
I agree with a large majority of this forum, I tend to use green on black whenever I can. Even when using my browser, I get headaches from the black on white background. I am extremely photosensitive.
"God, why do you wear those rainbow suspenders?"
For me, nothing beats orange phosphors.