HN Explorer

Tell HN: Gray text on white background sucks the blood out of my eyes

11 points by mrpixel ↗ HN
HN posts are so enjoyable. Unless I'm thinking up novel animal names for designers that confront me with such a "color" scheme, because 1) I have a very hard time reading even halfway through interesting posts, 2) I'm jealous, because my vision is obviously suboptimal, 3) I only got a laptop, and its display demands contrast.

It's bad. It's itching. And it's obvious. Try to find something printed with gray text on white background. Ads and porn not included.

Please! Stick to essential typography! Make it BLACK on white. TNX1E6

8 comments

[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 32.8 ms ] thread
flashingpumpkin
You can fix it with a simple user script for your browser.

User script, install to have black font in comment threads: https://gist.github.com/raw/1600378/95ad884caa17d8a02f1f425a...

And the gist: https://gist.github.com/1600378

polyfractal
Thanks for the script, I installed it myself.

With that said, I think HN is the only community where the maintainer of the site merely has to wait until someone fixes usability problems themselves.

It is frustrating to see a slew of "Boy, this feature really sucks/broken/why isnt it here?" posts. Not because they are wrong (they are usually correct, like this post), but because the automatic solution is "fix it yourself" rather than "why hasn't pg fixed this?"

It just strikes me odd.

funkah
While you're waiting for the ocean to boil, use Readable or Readability or Safari's reader feature or...
mooism2
It's to encourage you to make the post on your blog instead, submitting the link to HN.
endianswap
That is an interesting point, and may be true, but this problem also applies to the advertisements on HN (e.g. We're hiring designers!). It is my understanding that they don't have the choice to instead link to their blog and instead have to live with grey on off-white,
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