Don’t get me wrong, few things look as cool as really nice photos or graphical art against a web page with a black background. But throw in a long blog post or other article text and then you’re just killing me.
Seriously, I experience retinal pain when I come back to the real world of white background pages after viewing text on black backgrounds for even a second or two. In fact, I usually only spend a second or two on a black background page with lots of text because it’s too hard to read.
Once I hit a page that has a black background with lots of text I usually bail out quickly. But before I do bail, I try to remember to look away and let my eyes adjust before I look back at a white background or I feel like I might set off some kind of seizure.
I agree, lots of photos and other art look great on black backgrounds but if you’re going to do a lot of text, spare the eyes of your visitors. Forget heavy text blog posts or articles on a black background. It just doesn’t work. If you’re serious about what you’ve written give up the uber-cool artsy, mad-at-the-world thing for a minute and figure out how to incorporate readable text into your site so that people might actually read it.
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i prefer white text on a black background. staring at a bright white screen for too long kills my eyes and the opposite is much more bearable.
Strangely enough, I once read a study about the most favorable colors for readability for backgrounds and text on web pages. That study concluded that a yellow background with green text was the best for your eyes. Go figure.
Talk about seriously making me puke.