What Font Color Is Best For Eyes? 702
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."
Colour? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
#000000 (Score:3, Insightful)
You know what? Just turn the monitor off and go look at something with depth-of-field.
Clarification needed (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
LCD/CRT (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Black on Green (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Blue on Black (Score:4, Insightful)
I just wish it was easier to select a "dark format" desktop and have everything read my local system settings for colors. I tried at one time, but I got so sick of web pages with white images for backgrounds disturbing my dark reading bliss.
Re:Yellow on Blue (Score:1, Insightful)
Many people have color-blindless ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Insightful)
Any shells that default to black on white, I switch immediately. It's not so bad in a web browser, but there's something about a shell and typing in it that hurts my eyes.
Colors and Contrast (Score:3, Insightful)
- - 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.Re:a serious response... (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, the problem is, people don't use light-on-dark properly, which makes it even harder on the eyes. If you use a thin font like Heveltica or Arial, white-on-black causes the letters to turn into a light grey. The thing is, the black "creeps" onto the lighter color. The general hints have been to either use bold, which fattens the letters enough to offset some of the creep, make the font size larger, or choose a fatter font. All of this helps offset the creep - it's only at the larger sizes does the effect of the creep become less noticeable. It's why I hate when Courier is used as a default font - it's damn hard to read on a black background. On Windows boxes, I much prefer the fat and easily read FixedSys.
But there are tons of contrasty color combinations. White-black is generic and isn't eyecatching, but great for long sessions. Colors like Yellow-on-Blue are easily read, and the blue doesn't actually "creep" into the yellow too badly. Yellow-Red and Yellow-Green work well too. But yellow can be quite tiring to read.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Insightful)
The result of this was horrific eyestrain. Yes, some people can handle bright colored text on a black background. Most get eyestrain or worse, migraines. This is especially so if you switch from green-on-black to black-on-white (like a printed page).
Typists and transcriptionists and grad students and pretty much anyone who needed to refer to a printed reference hated it. In the early '80s, color monitors were pretty much crap for text (too fuzzy, not enough resolution) so there was a boom in the production of "amber" monitors. These used monochrome CRTs that phosphoresced a muted yellow-orange. This wasn't quite as jarring to the eyes.
Then someone came up with paper-white monochrome CRT's, and that was pretty much all she wrote for greenscreens.
Geeks keep it alive, because of nostalgia and tradition. It's looks high-tech and cool, because there was a time when it was high-tech and cool - and because there is an association with Unix, and by extension, Linux. What's more Unix than a DEC vt100 terminal hooked up to a PDP-11? Nothing. That's about as close to the metal as you can get without a soldering iron.
But, please, for the sake of your eyes and the eyes of others, don't pretend there is any inherent advantage to green-on-black for the vast majority of users.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:1, Insightful)
Black-on-white is much more tiring for your eyes because that activates pretty much all of your retina at once, for prolonged periods of time. White-on-black activates only the select few while the rest is resting.
Re:Colors and Contrast (Score:3, Insightful)
It sounded like the OP was talking more about the effects of color & contrast on legibility. Which is not exactly the same as asking about color scheme (with its branding implications). I inferred that the poster was asking about colors for his own system, although I guess it's not specified and s/he could have been trying to design a legible system.
A clearly delineated layout may be more important than color for parsing a page with a lot of different types of content (like your typical webpage). But if the system at hand is used for reading lots of text, or perhaps a programming IDE, you could plausibly argue that the color scheme (insofar as it affects legibility) is more important for overall system usability.
Fiddlesticks. Although it's probably the case that most programmers are better off believing this statement than not believing it, that's a very limited understanding of usability. It's the equivalent of "never begin a sentence with a conjunction nor end one with a preposition."
There are many definitions of "good interface", and the best definition is more like "measured effectiveness for the task at hand by the frequent users of the system." You've given one definition of "good interface", but to say it's the only standard for quality is bullshit. My grandmother doesn't have to be able to walk up and use, say, the copyright violation content review tool that I've been working on lately. And if she did, the UI elements I'd have to use to explain it to her would make the system *absolutely insuffrable* for the expert paralegals who use the system for 6-8 hours per day.
One of the eternal balancing acts in creating a useful and usable system is between learnability (where a novice can take a look at a system and "get it") and expert efficiency (in which an expert who uses the system 8 or 10 hours a day can interact at the speed of thought). The gold standard is a system that is basically comprehensible on first perusal and doesn't violate users' mental model of the world -- which means that they won't have to perform unnecessary cognitive translations and mappings every operation. This tends to make the system more learnable. And over time, it affects experts' efficiency to not have to do all of these extra mappings.
One of my profs in [HCI] school used to say "make the easy things easy, make the hard things possible". which was his way of saying: make the primary functions really easy, walk-up-and-use easy. but make the stuff that experts want (like customizations, keyboard shortcuts, what have you) available for people who are incented by their heavy use of the system to seek those things out.
Even Jakob, that old codger, recognizes that you have to serve the spectrum of novices and experts:
http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html [useit.com]
I'm just saying -- get some nuance & don't be a prig.
Re:Green or Yellow on Black (Score:1, Insightful)
It is true, green is nearly in the middle of the spectrum humans can see, BUT this doesn't indicate in any way, we can see this part of the spectrum best.
The reason: humans don't have a continious colour perception. We use blue, green and red cones to detect rays of a certain frequency. The impression of colour is done by our brain. Without this tricking by the brain colours for computers or TV were not possible.
In fact the naming "blue", "green" and "red" for our colour receptors is misleading. The "blue cones" have their maximum of perception at about purple (German "Violett". I'm not sure, it's the right translation), the green at yellow and the red ones at green. The names are kept for historical reasons.
As for the original question: The only correct answer is "it depends".
I'm colourblind (with exeptions, but that's too difficult to explain here) and can't read any of the following combinations: white-blue, red-black or red-green. My preferred colour scheme is white on black and other bright-on-dark combinations. (And red is a DARK colour to me)
Re:Refresh Rate (Score:4, Insightful)
It is probably true for those very old monochrome monitors that had like half a second of persistence, but it is definately not the case for color TVs. Yes, there is some persistency, but over 95% of the photons are emitted within a millisecond after the electron beam hits the phosphor, and the other 5% are emitted gradually over tens of milliseconds. The net effect is that there's sharp flashing, plus about 5% (in this example) of a more-or-less constant background. That is not going to improve the flicker a lot; otherwise you could just point a lightbulb at your TV to increase the background illumination.
You can see the background light for yourself by taking a photo of a TV screen with a 1/200 exposure time.
What makes the flicker less obvious with a TV is that you normally watch a TV at 5-10 times the screen diagonal, and a computer monitor at only 2 times the screen diagonal, such that a much larger area of your field of view is covered by the screen. People are most sensitive to flicker at the edges of the field of view.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't be pedantic. Tired doesn't just refer to muscle fatigue and retinas do indeed become less responsive without rest.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Insightful)
I still wish someone would start requiring road signs to be sized appropriately for the speed of the roads. Speed limit signs are required to be larger in places where drivers go faster to give them additional distance (time) to be able to recognize the sign. Road signes need to do the same.
Additionally, we should have cross street hanging signs (the big ones hanging from traffic light wires) on every block in cities... Here in my city, it's hit and miss, some streets have them, others don't. if I'm in the left lane, there's little hope I can read a street sign, even when parked at a light. It's simply too far away to read 3" tall letters... especially on green backing.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:2, Insightful)
Because desktop publishing and graphic design aren't legitimate uses for a computer, of course.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the screen directly emits light, it is typically more tiring to your eyes. That's why people often prefer light text on dark background for a screen. I generally choose "old school" green or amber on black.
Re:Borland Turbo C Colors (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm amazed that knowledge so well known at the time has so completely disappeared that it's as if it never existed. GUIs took on other colour schemes for other reasons (what you see is what you get, which made the yellow (or white) on blue contrast badly), which isn't all bad, but certainly has lost a lot of utility.
Re:Great Blazing Colors (Score:3, Insightful)