In Black and White: How Words Looked Before the Digital World Turned Them Gray

Gray type is the invention of people who would just as soon you ignore the words on the page and focus on the pictures. In the service of design esthetics, those people have added needless pain to the pleasure of reading. After squinting at emails all day, my weary eyes are filming up even as I write this. Gray type makes your brown eyes red.

I am hardly the first to complain about this. Even graphic designers have challenged the perceptual principles of “ideal” visual contrast used by their colleagues to justify what is fundamentally an esthetic preference. Still, people who hold the power to determine how we experience words in print or email persist in thinking that gray scale is doing eyes a favor, even though “science” does not clearly support that conclusion. What gray type does do is make it harder to read certain kinds of print – and easier, therefore, to justify not reading it. This is particularly true in remote work settings where many people are seeing materials on visually inhospitable laptops. Gray type is just another excuse not to read at a point in time when the cup of excuses already runs over.

In a lamentation about gray type written for Wired some years back, Kevin Marks pointed out that the guidelines for ideal contrast – while ostensibly drawing authority from psychophysics – can be subjective. A viewer’s optical experience is also heavily device and context-dependent, which means that what’s acceptable on your smart phone with its vivid white-on-black display option may not work so well for you on your laptop. And as it happens, internet typography generally uses a lower contrast ratio than even its own style-makers, Apple and Google, recommend. 

Low ratios like 4:1 and 5:1 (barely half the ostensible ideal) have become pervasive for two apparent reasons. First, technological advances have made lower contrast typography feasible. Second, designers happen, almost overwhelmingly, to like them because gray type is submissive, it cedes prominence to graphic design. In other words, people who rule the way the internet looks tend to consider words expendable.

And, oh, yes, there’s another reason. The internet is the land of the fit where no one cares much about the vision-impaired. The terms of engagement for humans and computers are set by people under 30, who happen to know nothing about ripening cataracts.

Anyone old enough to be troubled by gray type is reluctant to acknowledge it because the work force, like the internet, belongs to the young and visually fit. It takes courage to complain that a document in feathery gray-type is difficult to read on your laptop. Thus, it’s not clear that complaints ever manage to reach, much less persuade most of the people empowered to design our online written environment, including the PowerPoint templates that shape information exchange in corporate environments. If those of us with more or less “ordinary” or “aging” eyes object to gray type, imagine the struggle for people with true visual impairment. A poor usability track record makes our limitless web metaverse far less inclusive than it is expansive.

Unfortunately, the graying of the internet has also accelerated the graying of the printed world where less saturation yields another benefit:  cost savings. Black pixels on the screen are free; ink is not. Newsprint is currently running at about 16 cents an ounce – a bargain compared to the ink jet in your home printer but costly just the same. The Faustian deal we made to preserve the paper in newspapers is that many of us can no longer curl up in the incandescence of evening with a printed copy of the NYTimes. And the drive to conserve paper with smaller font makes the shift to digital consumption a prophesy that continues to self-fulfill. I have certainly taken the hint. My shift to digital word consumption both for news and books is now nearly complete.

But to talk about the price of ink is to take a purely tactical view of things. We should focus on the cultural roots of this “grey is the new black” in typography. Fashion trends have always been metaphors that signal what is happening in society. The most influential of designers are cultural commentators – the rest of us just need to know how to decipher their code. Gray is what words wear when information engulfs us but much of it is untrue or discredited, and when “facts” are changing too fast for the ink on anything to dry. The very indefiniteness of gray, its failure to take a position on anything, also explains its preeminence as an interior design color for at least a decade. Gray seems civil. Tasteful. So much talk these days is not.

Gray type is, therefore, faint irony in an otherwise strident world where social media make words an instrument of cultural disintegration. If gray type could do anything at all to calm the conversation, it would be worth the sacrifice, eyestrain be damned. Unfortunately, gray type just makes it easier to look away from words. And when we take less notice of them, we take less care with them. All hope for nuance is lost.