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It doesn’t matter how great your business is, what products or services you offer, or even how appealing the layout of your website looks, if the text isn’t readable then people are going to quickly click away and look somewhere else.

There are obviously a range of factors that would make text unappealing for visitors to your website:

Too small and it’s hard to read and navigate.

Too big and it can mess up the rest of the layout.

Too text heavy without headings and it’s impossible to find what you’re looking for.

Too unusual with a crazy font is just irritating!

However, a concern that’s cropped up a great deal recently amongst online and design communities has been low contrast fonts and there’s even been a “movement” created called the Contrast Rebellion, to combat this problem.

contrast-rebellion

Low contrast is basically when there isn’t enough difference between a background colour and the colour of the font on top of it.

Here’s an example from Contrast Rebellion:

contrast-rebellionAs you can see, the lack of contrast between the two colours makes it much harder to read the text and I imagine it’d be near impossible for someone with sight problems or viewing the website on a smaller screen.

So these are things you need to be actively considering every time you tweak your website:

contrast-rebellion

However, Contrast Rebellion points out that there is a very very high number of websites with this kind of design and businesses are suffering as a result. Not only will it put people off reading more and re-visiting your website, but it looks very unprofessional and like these companies didn’t bother employing anyone with design knowledge to help build their website.

The movement calls for everyone to remember that although websites need to look good, they are primarily about content and if your design is making content hard to read something needs to change straight away.

Look at these examples of high contrast fonts that still look really good and work well with the colour palette of the rest of the site:

website design

web agency in london

Web design london

They look great don’t they? And, all of the content is readable regardless of the quality of the monitor, the lighting or whether you have problems with your vision.

The Contrast Rebellion may just seem like the views of a few designers, but have a look through some of your favourite websites and we bet the ones you read often have high contrast fonts. The W3C’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines also set a minimum contrast between backgrounds and texts so that it’s accessible for people with any kinds of problems with their vision.

To join the Contrast Rebellion and spread the work across your networks then visit the website for more information.

If you feel your website could be better in any way, then give us a call. We can evaluate your current website and tweak anything we feel will put people off sticking around, or build you a brand new website from scratch!

All screenshots from Contrast Rebellion.

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