I’ve been wondering these last few days if there is a definite correlation between whether you are a day time website browser and a night time website browser as to what sort of website colour schemes appeal to you, Dark on Light, or Light on Dark?
This pondering occurred when I started noticing that if I am browsing the web during the day, I don’t tend to mind pages with a light background and dark text as much as I normally do at night. At night I tend to prefer dark backgrounds with lighter text colours, and I also seem to have a tendency to like these colour schemes in general. I also noticed that I tend to do most of my web browsing at night, which seems to indicate to me that the light has a major effect on my preference for darker colour schemes.
I’m interested in your opinions on this… What is your preference, and what do you believe drives it?
I tend to prefer dark backgrounds, but it’s not because I’m a night owl – there’s a far more practical reason. When the screen is mostly black/dark, it’s putting out less light, which hurts my eyes less. After a while, I find the standard black text on a white background can get rather painful. But then, my headaches rule my life – healthy people don’t have to worry about stuff like that.