The Loss of Internet Legibility (And How We Fix It)

There seems to be a web design trend to reduce the contrast between text and backgrounds, thus making content difficult to read. Is this not the same practice of using the contrast between color to represent text and the outline, without any information in the typeface? What is the value of making text feel heavy and distracting?

Legibility should be a tenet or even a noble goal of web design and development, but if you look at what internet giants such as Apple, Google, and Twitter are doing, it seems as if we are headed towards an era of unreadable web content. Where do you find yourself in this mess? Do you find yourself squinting to read Night Mode themes on mobile apps just because the typeface, size, and color do not provide enough contrast?

When web development professionals say that they miss 1990s design philosophies, they are not being nostalgic hipsters. They have a list of ideas on how we can fix the ongoing and unreadable web situation, and they follow a logical fashion:

One goal is to use some typefaces like Tahoma or Helvetica instead of text, as an illustration of how web pages should look more like what they are supposed to be: documents. There is nothing wrong with fonts that were designed to work in a world of "black and white" backgrounds. The contrast is there, and if extra extra contrast between text and background is required, we can always use bold in order to enhance the "browsing" effect. But you could also use a simple transparent brown and a dark brown as long as eye-pleasing contrast can be achieved.

Making the web difficult to read was never the intention of Sir Tim Berners-Lee. As a global communication system, we cannot afford to allow dubious design philosophy to get in the way of readability. Unreadable web pages serve no purpose. What kind of internet would enable the people who are being left behind by the current system to access the services they seek, without having to squint to read. There has to be a better way, and that way can be found in the web design philosophies of yesteryear. For more information click here https://i.redd.it/8v8mblontsz51.png.