One of the big bosses at my company is up in arms about "grey font" right now. Even using the dark grey from our style guide for text ends in a lecture.
I know that contrast is critical and I have always valued function over form, but I see cases across the web where grey fonts have been used. Personally, I believe that pure black font is too much contrast and can be kind of jarring to look at on a web page.
The examples I have below come from Google and Apple, both of whom are renowned for leading the way (more or less) in web design. Both of these sites use almost entirely grey font.
I tried to use this as a way of saying that dark greys are fine to use, but my boss swears that it's a bad trend that people will look back on in 10 years and say "man they were stupid in the 20 teens".
I pulled the following info off of a government website.
From Section 508:
- A contrast ratio of 3:1 for text with a size of 18 points (14 points if bolded) or larger, or
- A contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for text with a size less than 18 points (or less than 14 points if bolded)
I checked the contrast ratios on one of Google's web pages and apple.com using this tool.
Here's Google
Here's Apple
I also found this on another website that shows the point at which the grey becomes too little contrast.
How can I convince my boss that as long as we pass the contrast test, grey font is fine to use?
And is it okay for Apple to have text on their site that fails every section of the contrast test, or is it bad design/a bad trend?