1. The belief that very high contrast black one white contributes to eye strain for some people. I think this one is reasonable - read the literature on how I help dyslexics and this tends to come up. I tend to use a very dark grey instead of black - about 90%
2. A desire to create visual heirarchy without end up with a horrific fruit salad... visual hierarchies are important in text. You can create them by altering font, size, style or colour. Ideally you should be able to create the heirarchy subtly - so the reader understands what is important, but while keeping the site looking clean and sophisticated (see point 3). Changing the greyness of text is one more tool in the box - and where heirarchirs are complex designers can find themselves hunting for tools
3. Minimalist fashion. No one wants their page to look old fashioned. No one wants to establish a visual hierarchy that looks like a Geocities page.
So the temptation is to keep colours muted, to keep style and font changes to the minimum. Using shades of grey to provide almost subliminal cues sounds cool.
1. The belief that very high contrast black one white contributes to eye strain for some people. I think this one is reasonable - read the literature on how I help dyslexics and this tends to come up. I tend to use a very dark grey instead of black - about 90%
2. A desire to create visual heirarchy without end up with a horrific fruit salad... visual hierarchies are important in text. You can create them by altering font, size, style or colour. Ideally you should be able to create the heirarchy subtly - so the reader understands what is important, but while keeping the site looking clean and sophisticated (see point 3). Changing the greyness of text is one more tool in the box - and where heirarchirs are complex designers can find themselves hunting for tools
3. Minimalist fashion. No one wants their page to look old fashioned. No one wants to establish a visual hierarchy that looks like a Geocities page.
So the temptation is to keep colours muted, to keep style and font changes to the minimum. Using shades of grey to provide almost subliminal cues sounds cool.