Whatever you choose, a background colour or a background image for your blog, make sure it sets the reader’s mood.
Background colour can create mood, add emphasis and immediately indicate a brand, but it can also impact the legibility and readability of your type. So here are just a few tips .
Keep characters clear
Legibility refers to how clear the individual characters of a typeface are. The clearer they are, the easier they are to read.
Background color can affect legibility by ‘bleeding’ into your text and overwhelming the finer typographic details that help define a character’s shape, like serifs, stems, strokes, and cross bars. To avoid legibility issues:
- inspect the clarity of these features on your chosen theme
- try bumping up your text size; and
- experiment with the other themes available from your Appearance settings
Watch your contrast
Readability refers to how easy it is to read text as a whole – as phrases, sentences, or blocks of text. Lots of things can affect readability, including line measure, tracking, size, etc. But when it comes to colour, it’s the contrast you want to watch. Too little contrast between your background and type colours and readers will have to squint to make out the words. Too much contrast and it can be hard on the eyes and cause fatigue (plus just be plain ugly).
I recommend not to go for a background image because of the difficulty in selection of the type of images like continuous, discrete, grayscale etc. Difficulty in adjusting the colour, contrast, brightness and other attributes of the image. Deciding to use using single image or tiles with correct size and positioning etc.
But here are some important things to take into consideration when it comes to choosing your background image :
- Your background image should be seamless otherwise it will look awkward and unattractive.
- Your background image should contain either mostly light or mostly dark colours to facilitate choosing an appropriate contrasting text color.
- Your web page text color and the general color of your background image must contrast enough to render readability.
Hope you get the bulls eye(reader’s eyes glued) with whatever background you select.
All the best!!
harsh_bhagtani92 