I do not have the best eyes and do not care overmuch for things that are, for a lack of better description, hard to read or comprehend visually. Many websites tend to fall under this category wherein too much content is placed everywhere on a webpage and takes away from the main crux of what the webpage is originally designed to do.

By using contrast and eliminating what may be considered as noise in a web page, it becomes much easier to navigate and accomplish a variety of tasks…

There is a web design book called “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug, which has several case studies of what people do in a given web page: can they find what they are looking for quickly? Do they get confused, or sidetracked? Do they ignore the main content of the page entirely? Is there a significant difference between frequent and new site visitors? Should there be a difference? The book addresses all those questions.

I prefer to have the majority of my computer applications to look and ‘feel’ the same way that I would like a web page to be; everything is in its proper place, easily able to be read, and does not have significant eye strain. To wit, this usually means black backgrounds and green text with everything pushed to one side. The main content of what I am working on, so to speak, should take up a generous portion of my screen.

This same design philosophy, I think, should be applied to everything; instruction manuals, presentations, web sites, GUI design, resumes, even coding. The more visible and readable you make your works, the greater the response will be.