Design Tip: Never Use Black

As someone with professional experience in photography and a masters in design – I think this piece is seriously lacking.<p>First – the photo that is used as "evidence" caught my eye quickly because it is clearly poorly processed/improperly exposed. There is no black point and that's a <i>bad</i> thing for the image; which leads me to say – you can't make the sweeping generalization that black is always bad. It's not – and the work of one pop art painter and a bad bit of photography isn't substantiated proof.<p>If you want to actually make something meaningful out of this, you'd actually push hard on the idea that too much contrast is a bad thing. Black isn't bad. Heavy contrast can be. Instead, get down to the root reasons that we have issues with contrast – in short, we're wired to notice <i>differences</i> in color or brightness than we are for <i>absolute</i> values of color or brightness. As such, it's not about one color, it's about the contrast.<p>Check out Jeff Johnson's Designing with the Mind in Mind: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Mind-Simple-Understanding-Interface/dp/012375030X" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Mind-Simple-Understanding-In...</a> or Colin Ware's Visual Thinking for Design: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann-Interactive-Technologies/dp/0123708966/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Thinking-Kaufmann-Interactive-T...</a><p>Both of those do a much better job at explaining the hows and whys of the average person's visual perception.

Unless, you know, you want highly readable text. In which case there's nothing better than pure black, as your text color or as your background (but not both at once, please.)

The best design tip I've picked up in the last five years was that sometimes, in your CSS definitions, you can use #555 or #777 or even #333, and not just black.<p>I don't mean that I didn't know you could enter hex numbers for colors, I just didn't realize that when I wanted a "black" border, #888 makes for a much less jarring border than #000...and this is critical if you have a lot of bordered elements.

This comes up often on hn. Using painting, especially Wayne Thiebaud's as support for the argument is very weak. He's a pop art painter that is known for using exaggerated colors, it's part of the pop art movement's signature style.<p>I would agree that when painting a shadow, you will likely find if you look carefully that it is not black, but in web design color is different and design has different goals to painting. The former is about clarity and function, the latter is expression and feeling.<p>In rebuttal to the argument, there are several hundred years of printing that seemed to have moved western civilization forward quite nicely that was black on white.

NO. This is how we end up with dark gray text on light gray background, on a web site.<p>If you're building something that people will read, <i></i>make it easy for them to read<i></i>.

This article suffers from a bit of confusion over the difference between art and design.<p>Art: don't use the color black (or build up to it.) Good tip from "childhood art teacher." Another way of putting it: don't use black unless you know what you're doing.<p>Design: black is the strongest color. (The three strongest colors in design are black, white, red.) However, don't use a black background with white text (or any other color text on a dark background; bad readability). If your design isn't working in black and white, it's not working.

My painting teacher at RISD told me that when he paints an outdoor scene he always mixes a tiny bit of blue into every color he uses, because the color of the sky is reflected off everything. It's a real skill to see color arbitrarily as it actually is, without attaching labels to it.

Avoiding black definitely causes you to make color choices that add more dimension and realism to your interfaces. Interfaces, after all, are representations of reality.<p>One helpful tip: "warm" colors jump out at you, and "cool" colors recede away from you. You can use this to your advantage when designing buttons, or even when working with typography.<p>More detail in this article, "Why Monet Never Used Black": <a href="http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/d4h-color-theory/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kadavy.net/blog/posts/d4h-color-theory/</a>

I'm not sure that this argument works.<p>#000 on my screen isn't black either. It's dark grey.<p>Doesn't this mean avoiding #000 for design aimed at screen display cause you to avoid pure black twice, and thus just reduce contrast? Perhaps that's what you want, and what looks better. But it isn't because #000 is pure black, because no screen can achieve that.

Good read. I came to this exact realisation myself not too long ago too. A hint of blue in your greys makes them much more appealing than pure grey.

how about "never use white?"<p>rgb(255,255,255) is the brightest color value you can have on the screen and colors like rgb(255,0,0) don't really pop against it because they're dark in comparison.

Okay, don't use black. I can just go to Tools -&#62; Web Developer -&#62; CSS -&#62; Disable Styles -&#62; All Styles to fix your bad design with a superior non-design.

Paul Rand (who was perhaps the best graphic designer of the 20th Century) would disagree with that "tip"

Learned about this in my motion graphics class, no such thing as pure black in nature.<p>Also, all of the articles on your website link to this story. Great reads.

Also stop using grey <a href="http://stopusinggrey.com/" rel="nofollow">http://stopusinggrey.com/</a> add just a bit of colors to you designs.

In case you're curious, the text you are reading now is #000.<p>Which is not to say that #222 wouldn't be easier on the eyes.

One thing to think about is that many users have auto-dimming screens, which means that your dark-grey color will appear black anyway. What tends to happen with these low contrast, analogous color schemes is that they result in a mid-gray soup of colors. I tend to use higher contrast on the web than in print. Itten's seven color contrasts is a great way to learn how to create contrasted color schemes that still survive dimmed screens, even without using the light/dark contrast.

Well, black is not black, it is simply the darkest color your medium (paper, screen, etc) can display. Not using it would effectively reduce the dynamic range of your medium.

Brilliant Article .This made me read color theory<p>For starters, <a href="http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for-designers-part-1-the-meaning-of-color/" rel="nofollow">http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/01/28/color-theory-for-...</a><p><a href="http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mobile-design-tutorials/introduction-to-color-theory/" rel="nofollow">http://mobile.tutsplus.com/tutorials/mobile-design-tutorials...</a>

I couldnt disagree with this article more. I'm frustrated with how little webpages use black.<p>In all my development environments where i'm coding for hours on end, i always find black background with white text to be far superior in terms of readability. I wish everyone had AMOLED screens (even on our desktops) so using black had more of a real purpose.

While the article is well presented, and contains many good points, I must take issue with a few of the ideas set forth.<p>1.) I'm not taking "design tips" from someone whose site takes so long to load on a slow connection.<p>2.) Obviously the author has never been in a cave and turned all lighting off. Cave darkness is a complete and total absence of light &#38; color save for black. This color IS NATURAL!<p>3.) In the spirit of the "green" movement, doesn't the use of black equate to less power consumption? (Remember <a href="http://www.blackle.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.blackle.com/</a> "energy saving search?")<p>That said, I'm sure that the author is vastly more artistically talented than I, as I can't even color within the lines in my grandchildren's coloring books!

Disagree with the concept. I would recommend studying pixel art for examples of really strong color usage - most modern styles work within an economical palette, just like in graphic design. Black is commonplace, it's how it's used that matters. The scene as a whole has similar considerations for contrast and weight as graphic design, even though the individual elements tend to emphasize detail and lighting.<p>Enormous pixel art thread: <a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=167.0" rel="nofollow">http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=167.0</a>

I'm not sure this applies to user interfaces and digital design, where style is a huge aspect. The starkness of true black on true white is stark, and sometimes that's what you're looking for, especially for minimalism. For example, see <a href="http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/" rel="nofollow">http://whatthefuckshouldimakefordinner.com/</a>. I would think a design student would recognize that not everyone wants to have the same look and feel as other people, and there is a place for black. Just not in his sketching class at RISD.

Now someone needs to tell this to the people who redesigned <a href="http://salon.com" rel="nofollow">http://salon.com</a> recently. It's virtually unreadable.

Never use black because it's too strong to always be used? If you want something strong, use black. If you don't, don't. That's about it.

It really depends. I am not a fan of the tip because it is a bit misleading. The reason there aren't many true blacks in representational art is due to reflection of light into the shadows.<p>Also, given the overall temperature of an image, it can be just as high-contrast to use a color on the opposite end of the color wheel.<p>Either way, these are style decisions, which are highly subjective.

anyone else have this experience: reading this article on an iphone only to notice that the thing in my hand - perhaps the most successful consumer electronic device in the world - was as close to jet black as anything else I'd seen today? :\ ... what about black turtle necks - are those OK?

Little experiment: I changed text from black to #130F30 on a website and couldn't notice the difference..

I find this approach too extreme. Black is sometimes needed. You may choose to use true black and maximize the contrast when you need to improve readability, especially for accessibility reasons.

shpoonj your account has been hellbanned as of 11 days ago here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305877" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4305877</a>

Funny to see this ranked right above Pulse's post: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360756" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4360756</a>

How do I reconcile this with "Always Bet On Black?"

op obviously not as knowledgeable as he thinks he is. but as some here mentioned theres nothing better than light on dark for eye comfort.<p>otoh if you take antialiased font it will NEVER be really black anyway. and people who use bitmap fonts for long hour coding sessions just because it feels better, causes less headaches etc. will tell you that you can take your advice and ... ;)

"Why does the Facebook Mobile interface feel so nice?"<p>I didn't know that, looks horrible to me. But either way a somewhat good read in general.

Except for movie posters Clockwork Orange. Aliens. Star Wars. Love the black.

Unless, you know, you want to make images or video pop out with great contrast.

Erm... The "absolute black" on your screen isn't absolute black either...

to all the commenters arguing against the point... this article isnt for you. it's for people who just through everything up as #000 and #FFF.<p>It's for the people who desperately need things like bootstrap.

There is a lot of black on HackerNews and I love HN:)

funny thing for me is that I had a hard time reading his blog since the font color is too light for me. It could just be me though.

I really hoped that this was going to be a joke about how, if you use black, Apple will sue you for patent infringement...

Ansel Adams disagrees.

its funny how most people here dont know anything about design .. i totally agree never use black .

Totally agree.