I do like light-on-dark in many contexts, but high-contrast light-on-dark using “ordinary” body-text typefaces always looks terrible to me (Bad Things, to my eyes, happen where the strokes are narrow). For e.g. monospaced typewriter-like text in text editors, light-on-dark works just fine for me. I mention all this not in order to try to provoke any changes; just musing, again, on how preferences vary. Incidentally, the green borders on new comments are super-duper-prominent in the light-on-dark theme; you might consider toning them down a bit.
These are, actually, very valid concerns, and you’re not the only person to have mentioned this sort of thing. An upcoming feature will address all of this. Stay tuned! :)
Edit: By the way, I’ve found that differences in how people perceive, and react to, various combinations of font / color / etc., are often largely caused by differences in the device that a site is being viewed on. (I’ve already made several tweaks to the site’s design to account for users on different platforms, which seem to have helped some people, and am always open to doing more in that vein.) Do you mind saying what you’re using to browse GW? (I’m interested in both hardware—what kind of device, what size of screen, what resolution, etc.—and software—OS, browser, version.)
Right now I’m on a laptop with a wide-gamut 15″ 4K screen. So e.g. it generally copes very nicely with fine details in type, and it’s possible that colours may appear more saturated than they do on other devices. It’s running Windows 10 and I’m using a recent version of Firefox. The zoom factor in Windows, which on my machine defaults to 250%, is set to 200%, so many things will be displayed slightly smaller for me than is standard.
I have also tried GW on two other systems. One is running Windows 8.1 and, again, a recent version of Firefox, but with a lower-resolution monitor (30“, 2560x1600). The other is running a Unixy system (FreeBSD, as it happens) and a slightly older version of Firefox, and a 24” 1920x1200 monitor. Neither of these displays has a particularly wide colour gamut and I have made no attempt to calibrate them for colour accuracy.
All the displays are LCDs with a standard RGB stripe layout. I don’t think I have any nonstandard configuration to report besides what I mentioned above.
My impressions of GW are essentially the same on all of these. I have tried my tweaked styles only on the first and last (which are also the two most different) and prefer them to the defaults on both.
These are, actually, very valid concerns, and you’re not the only person to have mentioned this sort of thing. An upcoming feature will address all of this. Stay tuned! :)
Edit: By the way, I’ve found that differences in how people perceive, and react to, various combinations of font / color / etc., are often largely caused by differences in the device that a site is being viewed on. (I’ve already made several tweaks to the site’s design to account for users on different platforms, which seem to have helped some people, and am always open to doing more in that vein.) Do you mind saying what you’re using to browse GW? (I’m interested in both hardware—what kind of device, what size of screen, what resolution, etc.—and software—OS, browser, version.)
Yeah, agreed, that can make a big difference.
Right now I’m on a laptop with a wide-gamut 15″ 4K screen. So e.g. it generally copes very nicely with fine details in type, and it’s possible that colours may appear more saturated than they do on other devices. It’s running Windows 10 and I’m using a recent version of Firefox. The zoom factor in Windows, which on my machine defaults to 250%, is set to 200%, so many things will be displayed slightly smaller for me than is standard.
I have also tried GW on two other systems. One is running Windows 8.1 and, again, a recent version of Firefox, but with a lower-resolution monitor (30“, 2560x1600). The other is running a Unixy system (FreeBSD, as it happens) and a slightly older version of Firefox, and a 24” 1920x1200 monitor. Neither of these displays has a particularly wide colour gamut and I have made no attempt to calibrate them for colour accuracy.
All the displays are LCDs with a standard RGB stripe layout. I don’t think I have any nonstandard configuration to report besides what I mentioned above.
My impressions of GW are essentially the same on all of these. I have tried my tweaked styles only on the first and last (which are also the two most different) and prefer them to the defaults on both.
Excellent, thanks for the detailed report—it’s much appreciated.