Creative Cogitation

So I am in the mid­dle of a learn­ing all sorts of mar­ket­ing stuff, and one thing this one per­son keeps going on about is artists who show their art on a black back­ground because it makes their art pop.  This par­tic­u­lar mar­keter hates it.  She points out that gal­leries don’t dis­play art on dark walls…  Her basic premise is black is a pow­er­ful color that can eas­ily over­whelm art.  Black dis­tracts from the art even as it draws you in.  I dunno about that but I will enter­tain the notion.

This mar­keter also says reverse type (white type on a black back­ground) is harder to read than the con­verse, espe­cially on the web.  That argu­ment won me over.  I don’t want my vis­i­tors strain­ing their eyes try­ing to read something. 

The prob­lem for me is that I had designed both my prints area and my orig­i­nal art areas with back­grounds that were nearly black-they were at least 80–90% neu­tral gray.  I chose the dark color as I did intend to use reverse type, and reverse type becomes more vis­i­ble the more con­trast you give it from the back­ground.  On the other hand I didn’t want to go absolute black with my orig­i­nal design, so the nearly black was my compromise. 

Fast for­ward to last week.  I did design my site with style sheets which meant I could eas­ily make big color changes.  It turns out I set the font color as a page prop­erty so I had to find that line of code in all my pages and change it.  For­tu­nately soft­ware also allows a find and replace option for all pages in the web so that turned out to be pretty easy too.  The biggest has­sle was with my images.  I have a lot of them set up as a swap image.  Swap images have to be the same dimen­sions, so I have filled out my images with back­ground match­ing the web­site back­ground; that meant I had to edit all those images.  But its all done I think; I didn’t check each page to make sure, but I did make sure all the images were updated. 

Demo of the old verses new web­site style

So instead of have 80–90% black its now 10–20%% gray back­grounds instead, nearly white-I just can’t bring myself to do pure white-its so bor­ing.  All the type is black san serif (ser­ifs are all those embell­ish­ments in cer­tain kinds of type like Times New Roman and also make web type harder to read) arial/helvetica family. 

So what do you think?  I have changed over the art and print sec­tions in their entirety.  Is Black type and col­or­ful pic­tures on white bet­ter than White type and col­or­ful pic­tures on black? Was all that dark gray detract­ing from my work.  This inquir­ing mind wants to know what her patrons think of the change.

Jake

Artist, AKAJake.com Come Expe­ri­ence the Art!

The art work in this blog is fed­er­ally copy­righted. All repro­duc­tion and pub­lish­ing copy­rights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imi­tated, derived OR oth­er­wise used in any form with­out the explicit writ­ten per­mis­sion of the artist.