Had a nightmare week with low contrast text on my site

Last Tuesday I was trying to finish a project for a client in Denver and I kept getting complaints that my text was blending into the background. I checked my hex codes and realized I was using #999 on white which is super low contrast. Turns out I was designing on a high brightness monitor at home and it looked fine there. My client has older eyes and they couldn't read a thing. Has anyone else had a similar problem where their screen settings tricked them into bad contrast choices?

2 comments

2 Comments

jake_mason3011d ago

Turns out I was designing on a high brightness monitor" - that's exactly what happened to me. I used to just trust my screen and never checked contrast, until I got a real cheap monitor for my second setup and realized how washed out everything looked. It totally changed how I test colors now, I always check on a couple different screens first.

kellymurphy11d ago

Exactly the same thing happened to my buddy @jake_mason30 at his old job, actually. He was doing all this photo editing on a laptop that had some weird color profile and everything looked great to him. Then he printed one of his big projects and the whole thing came out with this nasty green tint. Turns out his screen was pushing way too much blue and he never noticed because he was just used to it. He ended up borrowing my old dell monitor just to double check and it was like night and day. Now he keeps an older crappy screen around just to test how stuff looks on a normal person's setup. Its wild how much our eyes just adapt to whatever screen we look at all day.