Grey text site of the month

[ihategreytext]

Looks like yet another site has gone down the route of 'Let's make the text as light as physically possible, while only JUST being able to see it'.

Then they lose it when they get to the almost invisible links at the very bottom of the page.

I see that even Sitepoint has become 'greyed', ridiculous grey border lines which might as well not be there, grey nav bar, ridiculous links all over the place which AREN'T CLEARLY LINKS, because they aren't underlined, and aren't in buttons, so it's impossible to tell, just by looking, what is a link, and what is a title.

Hurrah for grey text! I no longer need to go for walks on the misty moors, or run a hot bath to make my bathroom full of steam, I can view my websites as if I'm looking through a mist!

When is this stupid trend going to end? I see that grey border lines, which are almost invisible, is the 'new thing' among web designers...

[ihategreytext]

I wonder if somebody will one day set a legal precedent when they sue (or win a case against) a site that uses grey text for a link to its legal page, or terms and conditions, and the customer says they didn't see the link because it was too LIGHT to notice, and all because some moronic, sheep like 'designer' wanted to make everything as difficult to read as possible.

Ooh... the irony... I have to manually edit EVERY POST I MAKE to make the text BLACK. Thanks, Sitepoint! Can't have that 'harsh, clinical' #000000 getting in the way of your designer's ideals, can we... LOL!

[Stevie D]

Off Topic:

As I explained on your other thread, we do not operate a 'name and shame' policy on these forums. We're more than happy to (politely and respectfully) discuss design features that irritate the heck out of you, but we're not in the business of setting out to damage a company's reputation.

There are some advantages of using grey text over black ... particularly if you go for a dark charcoal shade rather than a light silver shade – it can make text easier to read, particularly for people with dyslexia, and it can appear less threatening than the starkness of black against white.

On the other hand, I do completely agree that too many sites go for what they perceive as a trendy route, with the greys far too pale to be read easily.

Part of the problem is the different people see a page in different contexts. The age and quality of your monitor plays a role. The ambient lighting around you plays a role. Whether you have any form of anti-aliasing or sub-pixel hinting plays a role. And that's before you even get down to the question of an individual's eyesight, which can create huge problems for some people reading text that has insufficient contrast.

If designers are used to seeing text render crisply and cleanly on a high quality screen in perfect light conditions, and have 20:20 vision themselves, it needs quite a lot of empathy to come to terms with the need to use dark text. Why do designers dislike dark text so much? Because a lot of them see text as simply another design element to be manipulated in search of improved aesthetics. Black or very dark text can dominate a page's appearance at the expense of the design features that they have put most of their effort into, so they try to soften it so that the graphics come to the fore.

I'm not saying that all designers are like that – not by a long way. Just that there is a significant minority who have a tendency to put aesthetics ahead of practicality.

[ihategreytext]

Have a look at the new Ebay site - look at the left hand column when you are looking at products - there is a grey 'highlight' when you mouseover different sections of it - but the designer is so obsessed with GREY that there is almost no difference between the 'highlight' grey and the original grey! And this is what it's come to - meaningless GREY everywhere, on all the 'big' websites. We might as well all sell our colour monitors and buy GREYscale ones.

Still, I'll give Ebay one thing - 99% of the text on their site is high contrast, with only a tiny few bits of grey to ruin things...

[ralph.m]

there is almost no difference between the 'highlight' grey and the original grey!

It stands out very strongly on my monitor (if I'm looking at the right page)—so as Stevie said, it can depend a lot of the monitor, lighting etc. Gray is handy where yo don't want too many colors conflicting with each other on the page. There's already enough color on the Ebay page, IMHO.

[ihategreytext]

On my monitors it's only a very slightly different shade of grey, maybe you were looking at another page - this is the bit I mean:

Ebay grey.jpg

The top grey is #F5F5F5, the lower is #EFEFEF.

Anyway - this is interesting, another example, IMHO, of design over functionality:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/ex...#_Toc293583899

I was scanning down the page trying to find various sections, and it seems that Microsoft have gone for the 'Let's not use any clear titles or dividers, or anything really, to distinguish one topic from the next, a la Windows 8 stylee'. It's insane. They have the same size margin above a section title as below it, for example, and that wretched Segoe UI Light font as well. All done, of course, in GREY text, #444444 to be precise...

[ihategreytext]

[font=verdana]

Off Topic:

As I explained on your other thread, we do not operate a 'name and shame' policy on these forums. We're more than happy to (politely and respectfully) discuss design features that irritate the heck out of you, but we're not in the business of setting out to damage a company's reputation.

I am quite amazed that I can't even discuss the specific design choices of a given website. I just looked back at my original post and now it doesn't make any sense, since nobody knows what site I am talking about! Are my two first sentences really going to "damage a company's reputation"? Which company using their services would be reading Sitepoint? All I stated was my opinion of what their site looks like- anybody wanting to use their services is surely going to see their website, and decide for themselves whether it's too grey?

Now I look like an idiot to anybody reading that first post, it's just meaningless without being able to actually SEE the site in question. What should I do? Take a screen shot of the salient parts, and keep out any reference to the actual company? I don't mind as long as we can all see what on earth I'm talking about.

[ihategreytext]

I've smudged out any identifying information, isn't this too light to read easily? (This is a different site, I could post up a hundred different sites like this).

greysite1.jpg

[Stevie D]

Off Topic:

I am quite amazed that I can't even discuss the specific design choices of a given website. I just looked back at my original post and now it doesn't make any sense, since nobody knows what site I am talking about! Are my two first sentences really going to "damage a company's reputation"? Which company using their services would be reading Sitepoint? All I stated was my opinion of what their site looks like- anybody wanting to use their services is surely going to see their website, and decide for themselves whether it's too grey?

The reason that we don't "name and shame" companies without their knowledge or involvement is this. There have been incidents in the past where Sitepoint Forum threads have appeared high up in the search results for a query on the company name, and in some cases even beating the actual company website. How bad would it look for a Bob's International Widgets if the top result in Google for that term was not bobsinternationalwidgets.com but a forum thread slating that site's design? While you, or even I, might personally think that the site is appalling and deserves to be humiliated in that way, the forums are not our personal blogs or websites and we have to be mindful of that fact. Sitepoint does not want to be on the receiving end of claims for defamation or loss of earnings – even if those claims are completely untenable, we don't want to have to deal with them. So we make sure that we don't have to deal with them, by not allowing comments or discussions that could fall into that category.