Author Topic: Arrivee redesign  (Read 9295 times)

bludger

  • Randonneur and bargain hunter
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #25 on: 06 December, 2019, 01:00:16 pm »
I think the YACF desktop interface is a nice compromise. I receive the contrast as good, but don't feel I've bright white laser beams being fired into my eyes.
YACF touring/audax bargain basement:
https://bit.ly/2Xg8pRD



Ban cars.

frankly frankie

  • I kid you not
    • Fuchsiaphile
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #26 on: 06 December, 2019, 01:06:26 pm »
But white on black is easier for some people to read.

It was the preferred choice for car number plates, back in the day.  In absolute terms it may be more legible.   But in general white text on black is frowned upon.  For example in website design it's pretty poor form.  (see my website link << for example  ::-) )
when you're dead you're done, so let the good times roll

Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #27 on: 06 December, 2019, 01:13:49 pm »
I found several pages of this issue almost unreadable due to the lack of visibility of the text.
Which pages?

FifeingEejit

  • Not Small
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #28 on: 06 December, 2019, 01:28:28 pm »
But white on black is easier for some people to read.

It was the preferred choice for car number plates, back in the day. 

That was partly to do with the developments in retroreflectives that had advantages beyond just the polis' ability to read plates in the dark.
It's also sort of in the Venice convention, many of the convention signatory countries ignore either the white front plate or the yellow back plate rules...
Arguably the german and belgian white rear plates are the worst offenders as they also fail the rules against showing a white light to the rear while in forward motion.

Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #29 on: 06 December, 2019, 02:18:08 pm »
I found several pages of this issue almost unreadable due to the lack of visibility of the text.
Which pages?
Pages 14, 15 and 26 were the worst offenders, with the text almost invisible in places, but pages 10, 11, 21, 22 and 23 were not easy to read. Admittedly I have a rare and unusually severe form of colourblindness (technically I have two of the common forms simultaneously), but it seems clear from this thread that other people have had problems with this issue too.

Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #30 on: 06 December, 2019, 04:19:59 pm »
I think the YACF desktop interface is a nice compromise. I receive the contrast as good, but don't feel I've bright white laser beams being fired into my eyes.

It's also more subtle when reading at work!
Duct tape is magic and should be worshipped

Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #31 on: 06 December, 2019, 04:38:59 pm »
I found several pages of this issue almost unreadable due to the lack of visibility of the text.
Which pages?
Pages 14, 15 and 26 were the worst offenders, with the text almost invisible in places, but pages 10, 11, 21, 22 and 23 were not easy to read. Admittedly I have a rare and unusually severe form of colourblindness (technically I have two of the common forms simultaneously), but it seems clear from this thread that other people have had problems with this issue too.
Your eyesight is probably waining? I wear glassess for reading and didn't have any problems
reading the articles on the pages you mentioned. Consider getting your eyes tested to make
sure it catches any degeneration.

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #32 on: 06 December, 2019, 05:01:02 pm »
I don't think you understand colour-blindness.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #33 on: 06 December, 2019, 05:08:01 pm »
I could just read pages 14 & 15 with both eyes. (My right eye is 'normal' and my left is damaged by optic neuritis and has poor colour vision & reduced acuity.)

White on pale does create a lack of contrast, which is suboptimal.

It's kind of handy to have eyes I can use to test some things...
Whereas to me, those pages are white text on dark, but varying shades of dark.

Clearly this is something that needs thinking about but I expect it's difficult to design with colour in a way that it is visually appealing to colour-viewers and legible to colour-non-viewers without having some relevant input. Maybe a colour blind audaxer needs to volunteer to give the pages a once-over before they go to print.

It's pretty straightforward: Just render your design as greyscale and check if it still works.  If not, go and pick some different colours.  No actual understanding of colourblindnesses required, and you've just made your design compatible with mono printing, too.

If you get to the point where none of the colours you want to use will work, then you need to re-evaluate your priorities regarding the relative importance of design wank and accessibility, and possibly consider a career in architecture.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #34 on: 06 December, 2019, 05:31:39 pm »
It being straightforward doesn't really help if no one's doing it though.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #35 on: 06 December, 2019, 05:52:24 pm »
I could just read pages 14 & 15 with both eyes. (My right eye is 'normal' and my left is damaged by optic neuritis and has poor colour vision & reduced acuity.)

White on pale does create a lack of contrast, which is suboptimal.

It's kind of handy to have eyes I can use to test some things...
Whereas to me, those pages are white text on dark, but varying shades of dark.

Clearly this is something that needs thinking about but I expect it's difficult to design with colour in a way that it is visually appealing to colour-viewers and legible to colour-non-viewers without having some relevant input. Maybe a colour blind audaxer needs to volunteer to give the pages a once-over before they go to print.

It's pretty straightforward: Just render your design as greyscale and check if it still works.  If not, go and pick some different colours.  No actual understanding of colourblindnesses required, and you've just made your design compatible with mono printing, too.

If you get to the point where none of the colours you want to use will work, then you need to re-evaluate your priorities regarding the relative importance of design wank and accessibility, and possibly consider a career in architecture.

Get an app for your phone that mimics colourblindness
It is simpler than it looks.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #36 on: 06 December, 2019, 06:39:13 pm »
I could just read pages 14 & 15 with both eyes. (My right eye is 'normal' and my left is damaged by optic neuritis and has poor colour vision & reduced acuity.)

White on pale does create a lack of contrast, which is suboptimal.

It's kind of handy to have eyes I can use to test some things...
Whereas to me, those pages are white text on dark, but varying shades of dark.

Clearly this is something that needs thinking about but I expect it's difficult to design with colour in a way that it is visually appealing to colour-viewers and legible to colour-non-viewers without having some relevant input. Maybe a colour blind audaxer needs to volunteer to give the pages a once-over before they go to print.

It's pretty straightforward: Just render your design as greyscale and check if it still works.  If not, go and pick some different colours.  No actual understanding of colourblindnesses required, and you've just made your design compatible with mono printing, too.

If you get to the point where none of the colours you want to use will work, then you need to re-evaluate your priorities regarding the relative importance of design wank and accessibility, and possibly consider a career in architecture.

Get an app for your phone that mimics colourblindness

Now (if you're doing it right) you're iteratively testing for maybe the 5 main types of colourblindness.  And faffing around with getting your design into a phone, presumably by doing something nasty like pointing the phone camera at a computer screen, which isn't exactly conducive to consistent colour calibration.

Obviously there's a time and a place for this sort of simulation (though it's much simpler if you do it on the same computer you're doing your graphic design in), but we're talking about laying out a magazine for Audax enthusiasts, not designing a GUI for the next version of Outlook.  The "does it work in greyscale" heuristic is usually good enough to get most people with normal colour vision to stop thinking in colour, and has obvious real-world advantages where laser printers and photocopiers are involved.

Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #37 on: 06 December, 2019, 06:56:14 pm »
I found several pages of this issue almost unreadable due to the lack of visibility of the text.
Which pages?
Pages 14, 15 and 26 were the worst offenders, with the text almost invisible in places, but pages 10, 11, 21, 22 and 23 were not easy to read. Admittedly I have a rare and unusually severe form of colourblindness (technically I have two of the common forms simultaneously), but it seems clear from this thread that other people have had problems with this issue too.
Your eyesight is probably waining? I wear glassess for reading and didn't have any problems
reading the articles on the pages you mentioned. Consider getting your eyes tested to make
sure it catches any degeneration.
Colourblindness is genetic, so doesn't change over your lifetime.

There are a number of ways in which vision can degenerate with age, presbyopia being best known, but also relevant is the reduction in the transmission of the lens due to the buildup of advanced glycolated end products. I'm quite old enough to suffer from the former, but being shortsighted it isn't really a problem for reading. For the latter, AGE level is dependent on lifestyle, so being a cyclist means that mine is unusually low for my age.

As you can probably guess from the above, I work in ophthalmic instrumentation and am very familiar with the performance of the eye.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #38 on: 06 December, 2019, 07:12:22 pm »
The "does it work in greyscale" heuristic is usually good enough to get most people with normal colour vision to stop thinking in colour, and has obvious real-world advantages where laser printers and photocopiers are involved.
But you don't want them to stop thinking in colour. If they do that, the magazine will look crap to the vast majority of its readers, who have full colour vision. Unless of course you're actually going to print it in black and white, which might be worth considering for other reasons. But barring that, surely what you want them to do is stop thinking only in colour, and produce a magazine which works well in both colour and colour-blind vision? If designing it in colour and looking at it in greyscale works to produce that, then all good. Probably.
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #39 on: 06 December, 2019, 07:15:46 pm »
The "does it work in greyscale" heuristic is usually good enough to get most people with normal colour vision to stop thinking in colour, and has obvious real-world advantages where laser printers and photocopiers are involved.
But you don't want them to stop thinking in colour. If they do that, the magazine will look crap to the vast majority of its readers, who have full colour vision. Unless of course you're actually going to print it in black and white, which might be worth considering for other reasons. But barring that, surely what you want them to do is stop thinking only in colour, and produce a magazine which works well in both colour and colour-blind vision? If designing it in colour and looking at it in greyscale works to produce that, then all good. Probably.

Quite.
It is simpler than it looks.

Kim

  • Timelord
    • Fediverse
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #40 on: 06 December, 2019, 07:27:15 pm »
The "does it work in greyscale" heuristic is usually good enough to get most people with normal colour vision to stop thinking in colour, and has obvious real-world advantages where laser printers and photocopiers are involved.
But you don't want them to stop thinking in colour.

Only for long enough to see if they've made an insufficient contrast error.  IME people with normal colour vision seem to find it hard to ignore colour differences for long enough to pay much attention[1] to contrast.  It's obviously going to be an iterative process if you're designing for more than one use case like that.


[1] Indeed, it often seems to override the presence of text or pictograms - just ask a colour vision person what the blinkenlights on some gadget are doing, and see how they reply.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #41 on: 06 December, 2019, 07:34:51 pm »
Seems to me that what we need is not for designers to stop thinking in colour but to start thinking in shade contrast too. (I've called this "shade contrast" because colour is also a contrast; there might well be a better term than "shade".)
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #42 on: 06 December, 2019, 08:07:45 pm »
With some forms of reduced colour perception, some things that seem midway down the grey scale seem nearly 'black' and some seem nearly 'white'.

It's not ALWAYS just a matter of rendering into greyscale.

I frequently play my right eye off against my left. For ME (only really) blue is good, yellow is poor and red is very, very variable.

Style vs substance will always be an issue as soon as there are readers whose vision isn't A1

Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #43 on: 06 December, 2019, 09:24:30 pm »
The areas that have been flagged all seem equally problematic to non-colourblind readers, so really they just need to raise their threshold for minimum acceptable legible contrast.

OTOH we are load of idjits on the internet demanding volunteers trying their best in their spare time do better, which is a bit rubbish.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #44 on: 06 December, 2019, 10:27:31 pm »
The areas that have been flagged all seem equally problematic to non-colourblind readers, so really they just need to raise their threshold for minimum acceptable legible contrast.

OTOH we are load of idjits on the internet demanding volunteers trying their best in their spare time do better, which is a bit rubbish.

Somewhat agreed. I think that if there are vision experts available, they can:

volunteer their expertise at the point that it can make a difference
or
sort of do something else after the fact
It is simpler than it looks.

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #45 on: 06 December, 2019, 10:47:14 pm »
I think the Arrivée editorial team are doing a great job. I don't want to decry/disparage their efforts.

I think the lot of visually challenged readers could be improved if a .txt file for the articles were downloadable. File size of .txt is TINY.

Readers can then manipulate fonts, sizes and colours on their own screens and/or printers.

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #46 on: 06 December, 2019, 10:51:43 pm »
I agree. The team of volunteers does very well.
It is simpler than it looks.

Redlight

  • Enjoying life in the slow lane
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #47 on: 07 December, 2019, 10:47:48 am »
I've passed all the constructive comments here on to Ged and I know he will take them into account when working on the designs for the next edition.  That doesn't mean that we will revert to everything being in black 12pt on a white background but, hopefully, we should avoid anything being unreadable by the majority of readers.

As an aside, it's worth bearing in mind that (a) from what people have said on here, colour blindness is a complex condition and what is clear to one sufferer may be a challenge for another. It's hard to be certain that every reader will be able to read everything easily, so please don't think that it's intentional; and (b) sometimes things don't look exactly as they did on the screen when they are printed.

I will also look into the idea of making the text files of articles available on line, possibly as part of an AUK Archive.

That aside, submissions are invited for the next issue....
Why should anybody steal a watch when they can steal a bicycle?

Jaded

  • The Codfather
  • Formerly known as Jaded
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #48 on: 07 December, 2019, 01:23:12 pm »
For accessibility: For a local magazine produced in InDesign we make sure the stories are tagged, then output as a pdf. I then open it in Acrobat and save as accessible text, then make the text file available online. It isn’t perfect, but pdfs do not work in text readers.
It is simpler than it looks.

Cudzoziemiec

  • Ride adventurously and stop for a brew.
Re: Arrivee redesign
« Reply #49 on: 07 December, 2019, 04:22:48 pm »
I think the Arrivée editorial team are doing a great job. I don't want to decry/disparage their efforts.

I think the lot of visually challenged readers could be improved if a .txt file for the articles were downloadable. File size of .txt is TINY.

Readers can then manipulate fonts, sizes and colours on their own screens and/or printers.
Neat idea! Or at least it seems so to me.

For those who also have Cycle magazine (my copy always arrives a day after or before Arrivee: spooky!), how legible do you find the black-on-clouds text in the top right corner of p45? And the blue on blue eg p14?
Riding a concrete path through the nebulous and chaotic future.