Black and white’s the way to go for a good read
MANY years ago when I bought my first computer it was considered an item of amazing modernity. It was an Amstrad and probably had the computing power about a 100th the power of my present cellphone. Let me amend that. It probably had less than half the computing power of my electric toothbrush.
I bought it because I was writing a book and the publishers would no longer accept manuscripts typed on paper. They wanted disks.
The Amstrad did what was asked of it and I managed to produce two books on it.
Like all computers at that time, the screen was black and the letters were made up of tiny green dots. When the Cape Argus converted from typewriters to computers their huge Atex machines also wrote in green dots on a black screen. That was the way computers were. Eventually, however, somebody worked out how to make a computer that typed in black on a white screen and life immediately became more pleasant for us all. It was a far more natural thing to work with. After all, the human race had been reading manuscripts written in black on white for centuries. There must have been a reason for this.
Today anybody who wrote in green on a black background would be considered very strange.
I find it odd many magazine publishers insist on printing their articles on dark backgrounds. Haven’t they noticed computers got over that stage decades ago? I think designers feel it’s artistically clever and adds “balance” or “depth” to the look of the page. The problem is it’s often darn hard to read. I open a DIY magazine and find a description of a flashlight printed in white letters on a grey background. On another page there’s an article about a new weapon system written in white on a black background. There’s also a story in black on a grey ground.
Another magazine in front of me features a pudding recipe in white on a blue background. The worst example I’ve seen was a story printed in yellow on a grey background.
Why? It may break the page into satisfyingly artistic blocks of colour, but it’s not comfortable to read. It might be acceptable if the reader has 20/20 vision and is sitting in bright daylight, but it’s probably not at all acceptable to anybody over 60 years of age and reading by the light of a bedside lamp.
Perhaps I’m being quaintly old-fashioned. Maybe nobody actually reads printed words any more. We read e-books that come in black type on a white screen. The people who buy magazines get them to look at the latest photographs of Kim Kardashian’s bottom.
I guess that looks much the same in any light and even with strength-4 reading glasses.
Last Laugh
A businessman from Cape Town was on a trip to Joburg and ended up having a few drinks in the bar of his hotel. He started chatting to the barman and said: ”You guys always think Joburg is better than the Cape, but we have all that natural beauty and golden winter sunshine.”
“Ah yes,” said the barman, “but remember the sun rises in Gauteng an hour before it rises in Cape Town. That golden sunshine you brag about is actually just second-hand Joburg sunshine.”