Web Pages That Suck - learn good web design by looking at bad web design

Zen Habits(for those who don’t like to read and just want the link)

Vincent Flanders’ comments: Recently, a well-respected site for the web design community cited a number of sites for their wonderful design. One of these sites intrigued me, but it was a site for a web designer and I don’t critique these types of sites to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest. However…

…the image above is a full-size, high-resolution screenshot of some of the text (with most of the customer name redacted).

When I went to the site I was hoping for a religious experience and I was not disappointed. I started speaking in tongues. Unfortunately, the web site made me speak in Tourette tongues. Lack of contrast makes me unhappy and sets me off.

Later in the day, I went to my RSS reader and saw that the Zen Habits blog was running a story called Would You Rather Be Right or Happy? It’s a great title so I clicked the link. As soon as I saw the text, I knew something was wrong — and my regular readers will know what I knew was wrong — the #3 Biggest Mistake in Web Design 1995-2015 — Contrast, Dammit. I went to the AccessColor web site to make sure I was right.

Of course, I was right — and that made me happy! Who says you have to choose between being right and being happy?

This screenshot shows you part of AccessColor’s report. Here are the important parts:

1. Both color difference and color brightness do not meet the recommended standard for 8.99% of the total text.
2. Either color difference or color brightness does not meet the recommended standard for 78.77% of the total.

Text on background with images is for 0.03% of the total text.

Zen Habits – Would You Rather Be Right or Happy?