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TIBCOSoftware / flogo

Project Flogo is an open source ecosystem of opinionated event-driven capabilities to simplify building efficient & modern serverless functions, microservices & edge apps.
http://flogo.io
BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License
2.41k stars 288 forks source link

Please add more contrast to main website, avoid low-contrast font #464

Open supersexy opened 5 years ago

supersexy commented 5 years ago

Please add more contrast. Project is very interesting, but you should make the website readable by avoiding low-contrast font.

There are a few very specific cases where you want to use low contrast fonts - e.g. like some not-so-important remarks that you just want to add somewhere, but should not distract from the main content - usually this is a shady design technique to hide acually important content like business terms so nobody wants to read it - only used on half-criminal sites nowadays and a good indicator for services to avoid.

Please never use low-contrast fonts on the main part of the website. Actually, there is almost never a good reason to use low-contrast fonts at all.

Low-contrast fonts unfortunately are spread by "designers" with very bad education or by webdevs without any formal education at all, because they think that "it looks cool" without ever thinking about what "typesetting" really is about. It is about making things readable, not unreadable.

Removing that annoying low-contrast design from your site will give your projects a much more professional look - and make it easier for people to actually read the content.

Please also look at https://www.contrastrebellion.com.

Thanks.

amandayam commented 5 years ago

Hi @supersexy , thanks for the feedback! This is a great point and we will take a look at the font styles to double check. To clarify, do you mean the content on the flogo.io website or the UI itself? If so it would be helpful to be specific about which part of the text is difficult to read, or if all the text is unreadable. Thanks!

supersexy commented 5 years ago

I opened this issue for the font on the website itself, but of course if the GUI has the same font styling, it will have the same readability issues. I am not sure if we are looking at the same thing, for me e.g. this

image

is easily identifiable as a typical low-contrast design. You can see that e.g. the text in the screenshot above clearly is different than the text you have here in the text of the issue description. This is a design anti-pattern that lowers the quality of your product presentation and makes it annoyingly hard to read for many people.

As already mentioned there are just a few very specific use cases where low contrast fonts make sense, like e.g. not selectable items in a GUI - but even then the right question to ask might be "If the item is not selectable / clickable / usable, why do we show it at all?". There is never a good reason to use low contrast in the main presentation text or in any documentation of your product.

About which part: ALL the text is grey or light grey, so there is no specific part, it is all the text. I found this question very interesting - are you really not able to see that all the text on your main website is presented in a low contrast style?

Here is an easy way how you can see how other people / people with bad sight / people not in their twenties might see the text parts of your products: just reduce the contrast setting of your hardware display - of course this depends on the specific implementation of your hardware, but you might get the idea from such an experiment. Another way is to take your device out to a sunny place and try to read your website, compare that to other websites. Of course this again depends on the specific details of the display, but it might give you a hint that this is not a matter of taste or about personal preferences but it is an artificial technical limitation you are putting between potential users and your product.

Thanks again!