A Few Aesthetic Considerations

Don't become so enthusiastic that you forget the contrast and value criteria (light and shade) when you create tiled backgrounds! Use dark characters if your background is light, and vice-versa.

If you do not change the browser default colours for the text and the non-visited, active and visited links, use a light background, i.e. a value approaching the light grey default proposed by most of the browsers. This background will ensure that the text displayed with these default colours (black, blue and violet) will be legible over your customised background.

When you create tiling patterns, you should only use dark values or light values, but don't mix them. Otherwise, you will not be able to consistently use dark characters only, or light characters only. By following this rule of thumb, you will preserve the aesthetic look of your site. Even though this rule is based on common sense, on the Web you will find loads of multicoloured site backgrounds filled with illegible characters.



Figure 8: Pay attention to the contrast between text and background