Alternative to #fff background color, using #F7F8F8

[esri]

Alternative to #fff background color, using #F7F8F8

[fgarofalo10]

@nikolaswise @paulcpederson @jhough10

[paulcpederson]

@fgarofalo10 If the idea is to reduce eye-fatigue from reading, then wouldn't you want some of the words to be on light-gray? When you mentioned this before, I was kind of envisioning something more like:

Where readable content or long-form content sits on the light-gray.

[fgarofalo10]

good point, we can go either way... and perhaps experiment, as well as look at some A/B research regarding text with white vs the light gray background.

[nikolaswise]

@fgarofalo10 Im not entirely convinced that this is a problem. There are many sites that use a solid white background, and are primary all-day type resources. Github, for one. Other sites may be moving towards gray background for other reasons - more to do with their overall design goals.

I'm not certain that changing our design language primarily because other people are doing it is a good idea. For example:

a) In your comp, placing the text in a white box will not provide any real difference with eye strain, as the main focus will still be on the white ground.

b) With the white box around the text, the block of copy is constricted with very little margin. This is problematic, as any sort of long-form ready needs proper room to breath, and giving our content this room to breath will be easier for our audience. As is, we're constricting our content when we have an awful lot of room available to let it breath.

c) Removing the white block around the copy, as per Paul's comp, solves the problems of whitespace. However, the lower contrast between field/ground for the text might actually cancel out the bonus of eye fatigue.

d) With the gray background across the entire page, all of a sudden we're making the third-nav sidebar pop the most off the page, drawing the eye and not allowing much room for the eye to explore the page.

e) We should be making our design decisions based on our overall design goals for these properties - and that includes layout and pacing for all of our pages, and how our colors support the message and the content that we're providing.

I suggest that we stick to the approach that we've taken on the developers site - using an soft off-white to tone down the overall strength of the page and still provide us with our full range of grays to use for our layouts.

[paulcpederson]

after trying it out, it seems like this might not accomplish what we want it to