Something to consider when selecting blog font color

A large portion of your blog audience read your blog through a feed reader. If you're using a theme with a light colored font (such as Roller's brushedmetal theme), it looks great against the background of your blog, but barely visible against the background of some feed readers.

Light colored font against the blog's contrasting background:

house

Light colored font against a feed reader's light background:

house

On the other hand, I wonder why feed readers don't convert the font color to something that renders well against their background. I suspect some of them do, but bloglines doesn't. The moral of the story is you simply can't rely on them doing this for you.

Posted on: Jan 12, 2007

Posted by: lskrocki

Category: Blogs

Tags: none

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Comments:

That's good advice, but I'd like to add that you do not need to worry about your theme colors. If you use a theme that displays white text (like Brushed Metal), that's OK -- feed readers don't see your theme.

What you should avoid is setting fonts and font colors inside your blog entries. In your blog entries you should stick to plain text with a minimum of formatting. Using some bold or italics, a bullet-list or some indentation is OK, but setting font colors is generally unnecessary and distracting -- and can cause the problem you blogged about above.

Posted by Dave Johnson on January 12, 2007 at 10:50 AM MST #

Hi, I think the feed readers should ignore the font color if they already ignore the background color/image, it doesn't make sense to ignore only parts of the graphical appearance.

Posted by Marco on January 12, 2007 at 11:23 AM MST #

Hear, hear. Color should be (and usually is) declared in CSS, not hard-coded. Old habits die hard though, and it's not unusual to find font tags scattered about the web even today.

Posted by Greg on January 12, 2007 at 01:16 PM MST #

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