@Matt` - I think you are right. Black does look busier - but that’s not always a good thing. For some reason I prefer websites that look open and spacious rather than busy and crowded.

@Craig - I don’t really like light on dark. I can deal with it on a terminal though, and even read an occasional manpage this way but for longer reading or edition I’d rather use light background with white text.

@polarizer - I noticed that most of the artsy pages are done light on dark. Then again, I’m not a very artsy person.

Someone said somewhere that light on dark is very good for emphasizing text - for example using light on dark boxes in a dark on light setting makes them stand out and catch attention.

@Chrissy - hey, nice page. You are right, most pictures do stand out more on dark background. Then again most picture sites (flicker, fotki, photobucket) use dark on light scheme so go figure…

@vacri - heh, funny you mention that. In my office, we have exactly 3 CRT cubes. And 2 of them actually came with the windows servers, and are off except for the rare times when I need to fiddle with the server manually. Everyone else has an LCD or two on their desks. So Blackle would not save us much money here.

Interestingly, the folks at Blackle have got themselves a curious idea, but it’s going to fail. The idea being that it takes more energy to paint white than black on monitors, so if everyone can be convinced to use Google with a black theme, then monitors left on google will use less energy. They quote some research somewhere that shows that across millions of users, the savings are not trivial, but unfortunately what may have been true in the CRT world is patently not true in the LCD world.

the polarizer

ps: nice site - now in my bookmarks

I have a friend who used this to make it seem like he had more stuff in a folder full of art-stuff for school - black paper with stuff stuck to it looks more complete than if there are big areas of white left in the gaps.

On the other hand, sometimes if the text is very closely printed I find it easier to read if I highlight it (so it’s black on a light grey background) reducing the contrast. Alternatively increasing the font size restores readability. I think that’s caused by the text starting to turn into a big black blob on the page because the gaps of empty whiteness aren’t enough to properly define the letters.

Actually, the same applies with white text on black (in which case highlighting reverses the colour balance back to dark on light as well as reducing the contrast a little)

Meh, dark on light generally seems better, I’m going with my intuition on this one (my subconscious knows my eyes better than I do )