Like It Is

It’s amazing what you can come across when you’re blog-hopping - or blog exploring as I call it.

I came across Persephone’s BoxBlog, today, with this very pertinent (at least to me) article and even more revealing comments about being able to read some blogs. It’s called…
Attention All Brilliant White on Black Bloggers

Designers, blog owners take note.

The comment by Pony makes the most salient point, which I’ve paraphrased slightly:

If the point of your blog is to communicate, and anyone coming to your blog can’t read it because of your design - then you have not communicated.

Although I’m not a designer, I worked for a few years in web design environment with some very talented web designers - and extremely demanding clients. I write this as a blog reader as well as a blog owner. My focus, when being asked to evaluate and test web sites was and always will be about usability, and most if not all is applicable to blogs. I love good design but what constitutes good design seems to vary depending on whether you are the user or the designer. We may not design blog themes ourselves, but we certainly choose them for our blogs. Usually because we like the design and it helps present what we have to say.

Ultimately, though, don’t we want through our blogs to communicate with our readers? How easy is it for the reader to read what you’ve written in your blog? Do you know? Easy or difficult? Would you dare ask them or would you rather not know?

I do have a beef about white text on dark backgrounds, which comes in part from what I personally like to encounter and from what I know from my web days. I know many designers think light text on a dark background is cool, even funky.

Here’s some information which designers will probably, for the most part ignore because they love their cool designs:

Tiny fonts, tiny spacing white or pale text on dark backgrounds is bloody hard to read. As such, to me it’s poor design. I was surprised that, only when I changed my previous theme Regulus (which had a white background, but pale small fonts) to Press Row did some of my readers tell me that Regulus was so hard to read and that this new one was much easier. That the number of readers has jumped since changing I’m sure is no co-incidence.

But maybe as designer you’re designing only for yourself and don’t really care whether your readers can read what you’ve written, or as a blogger you happen to really like pale texts on dark backgrounds. If a blogger’s readers cannot read it, or have difficulty reading it, your reasons for designing it are secondary at best.

Readers will suffer in silence of course, or be forced to highlight your text to read it, or even, as I hear get hold of some tools to zap the colours (neat, didn’t know you could do that!). More often than not they will click away from your blog even though it may look interesting.

And if many have difficulty reading, what’s the point of writing anything in the first place? If you have the most brilliant article on your blog, it’s completely missed the mark if your readers have to squint to read the content or the comments, have to blink several times to read the tiny white or pale text on your wonderful cool dark background. If I come across a blog with pale text on a dark background I click away, sadly, but deliberately.

As bloggers we are publishers as well. This is a reading medium and blogs should at least give consideration to your readers (since they are the ones that read and leave comments - and assuming you want them to do this), more than simply being about the beloved design or template.

No doubt many designers will take the “No way I’m changing my cool design that I’ve put hours of sweat and toil into, are you crazy?” approach. But maybe some will really care about what their users want. Some blog owners, from the responses to the above mentioned article are being accommodating and changing the blog template so that readers can actually read their posts.

And if we bloggers (their users) demand themes that enable us to produce readable rather than unreadable blogs for our readers (i.e. dark text on at least a pale background) perhaps designers will take note and design accordingly.