Good afternoon everyone. I've been thinking about the color/contrast landscape of
computing today and have a bit of a nebulous quandary that I wonder if anyone would have
some insight on.
So terminals, they started as typewriters with extra steps, a white piece of paper on a
reel being stamped with dark ink to provide feedback from the machine. When video
terminals hit the market, the display was a black screen with white, orange, green, or
whatever other color of phosphor they bothered to smear on the surface of the tube.
Presumably this display style was chosen as on a CRT, you're only lighting phosphor
where there is actually an image, unlike the LCD screens of today. So there was a complete
contrast shift from dark letters on white paper to light letters on an otherwise unlit
pane of glass.
Step forward to graphical systems and windows on the Alto? Light background with dark
text.
Windows on the Macintosh? Light background with dark text.
Windows on MS Windows? Light backgrounds with dark text.
Default HTML rendering in browsers? Light backgrounds with dark text.
Fast forward to today, and it seems that dark themes are all the rage, light characters on
an otherwise dark background. This would've made so much sense during the CRT era as
every part of the screen representing a black pixel is getting no drawing, but when CRTs
were king, the predominant visual style was dark on light, like a piece of paper, rather
than light on dark, like a video terminal. Now in the day and age of LCDs, where every
pixel is on regardless, now we're finally flipping the script and putting light
characters on dark backgrounds, long after any hardware benefit (that I'm aware of)
would be attained by minimizing the amount of "lit surface" on the screen.
Anyone know if this has all been coincidental or if the decision for graphical user
interfaces and such to predominantly use white/light colors for backgrounds was a
relatively intentional measure around the industry? Or is it really just that that's
how Xerox's system looked and it was all domino effect after that? At the end of the
day I'm really just finding myself puzzling why computing jumped into the minimalism
seen on terminal screens, keeping from driving CRTs super hard but then when GUIs first
started appearing, they didn't just organically align with what was the most
efficient for a CRT. I recognize this is based largely in subjective views of how
something should look too, so not really expecting a "Person XYZ authoritatively
decided on <date> that GUI elements shall overwhelmingly only be dark on
light", just some thoughts on how we got going down this path with color schemes in
computing. Thanks all!
- Matt G.