Never Use Black (2012)

As someone with professional experience in photography and a masters in design – I think this piece is seriously lacking. First – the photo that is used as "evidence" caught my eye quickly because it is clearly poorly processed/improperly exposed. There is no black point and that's a bad thing for the image; which leads me to say – you can't make the sweeping generalization that black is always bad. It's not – and the work of one pop art…

I have been a professional artist for about twenty years and it is my considered opinion that any "rule" given out to beginners is actually a warning: violate this rule and making something that looks good becomes a lot harder, so you should probably better make sure you're not violating any other "rules" unknowingly. If you know damn well that you're violating multiple rules then sure, go for it - break your perspective, fill the drawing with tangents, shade with…

Pure black is the correct color for text. Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites, and there's no reason text on screen should be any different. Firefox's Reader View foolishly throws away contrast with gray text, but this can be fixed in chrome/userContent.css in the Firefox profile directory: @-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") { body { background-color: #FFFFFF !important; color: #000000 !important; } }…

>> Roads aren’t black. Your office chair isn’t black. The sidebar in Sparrow isn’t black. Words on web pages aren’t black. A #000 pixel on the screen of your mobile or laptop isn't black, either. I strictly adhered to the principle of never using black until I was specifically asked by one of my users that has presbyopia (and most people over 50 or 60 have it, to some degree) to make the text black. Black text was much easier…