I'm guessing the up-and-down time is Veerle doing last minute tweaks -- the "site offline" message is when someone purposely turns the system "off" in the EE control panel while they do some troubleshooting or edits.

Either way, I don't know if I can take the credit for creative typography, but I'm always happy to see designers play with type. Hurray!

I have a really wonderful CRT monitor at the moment and the dark grey still looks great on my end, too.

I see what you mean about it going up and down :( I was browsing quite happily showed a freind and it was telling me it was offine.

I just wish I had design skills like that :(

Although I am impressed by the design I'm not sure I like the light text on dark background (-trend). It looks good, I must admit. But for a realy content-rich website with great articles and tutorials, I find readability a lot more important then a first visual impression (or second, third, whatever). I will comment this on her site too if it's online again.
Maybe there should be some midway. like you did on this site Jonathan, using some dark background around the design but at the same time white as the background for the main content area.

I like the shift to these darker backgrounds. I've been meaning to do the same in my next redesign (considering my current is basically just white), but I have yet to find the time .. maybe I need to hurry up before it'll be all 'sooo 2006' ;-)

I agree w/ (Matthljs?). There's a reason that books have been printed with dark on white type for hundreds of years.

Levi and Matthijs -- yes, generally speaking, dark text on light backgrounds can be the most readable, especially when dealing with large chunks of text. However, as usual, there are always exceptions.

Also, I think it's a bit unfair to use the printed medium as a defence for dark text on light background as we are playing with different visual fields here.

For example, have noticed how much faster your eyes get tired reading large blocks of text on screen versus reading it in a book or newspaper? It's because light is diffused and is not directly coming from the book, while a screen is made up of well... light. So, it can be argued -- and has been argued successfully -- that it may actually beneficial to have light tex on dark backgrounds as it's kinder to eyes looking on a screen. A predominantly white screen is akin to shining a dull flashlight to your eyes for an extended period time because it's so light and bright.

It's for that reason even that some coders decide to change the background colour of their text editor to black, as opposed to white, as they feel more comfortable looking at that combination for long periods of time than the other way around.

In the end, it's personal preference. I code with dark text on white bg, but I have light text on dark background on my website.

The site design is definitely well done. I personally think it's due to the great visual and informational organization.

I'm actually doing a 'relaunch' of my own site, shifting to a darker palette -- and I love the theme HERE, the particular multi-column approach, that I've tried to play off that style to my particular needs. Thanks Snook for having such creativity!

My old site is very white... I'm not a great web designer, though I've done my share of visual/graphics design stuff here and there. My new site will be trying to make things visually more interesting -- most of the classic blogs are scrunched blocks of black-on-white, and I'm trying to 'pull myself out' of the standard. To that end, the main column/block on a given page will be a cool, dark gray.

And I agree with much of what Lea says. I'm a coder, and spend many late nights in a dark office with green text on black background! ;)

Keep an eye out, as I'm putting the new site up on the new domain hopefully in the next few days -- would love feedback from some full-time designers. ;)

Dude, don't stress too hard about your own site. I just discovered this blog and love your style. Cheers.

thanks for providing the similarly designed sites. i was looking for them when i saw veerle's.

I'm not totally a fan of the light text on dark background, mostly because after a while it becomes a headache to read large paragraphs of text unless you pull off the color contrast just right. What I do like, though, is a design like this site where the main readable content is on white, while the complimentary elements (like the forms and comment headers) are on black with light text. They pull off the cool look without sacrificing readability to the main content.

And the book argument does have a point; it's always been easier to focus on dark text on white backgrounds.

dustin diaz applied also light on dark for text though webdeveloper-webdesigner
where the site owner of duoh.com is webdesigner-webdeveloper simply better design touch

>The blog also becomes another in what is becoming a huge succession of light on gray designs. Here's just a few:

+1 more

http://www.dustindiaz.com/

I'm totally a fan of light on dark, in fact a couple of months ago I started a showcase of sites that use a light on dark color scheme:

http://www.lightondark.com

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