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Stop Using Grey Text (2025)

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Dear web designers:

Please, for the love of Glob, stop using grey text. And especially do not use grey text on an off-white background. It doesn’t make you look more “design-ey”, it makes you look inept.

Why‽ Why use grey text on a grey background? This requires you to specifically overwrite the default text color - you literally have to ship code (in the form of CSS) to construct this monstrosity.

Do you explictly want to limit your potential audience? Do you need a more creative way to express identity? Did you just see it one time and decide “okay, ship it”?

And please, if you must use poorly contrasting colors for your blog, support the prefers-contrast CSS media query to undo your sloppy workmanship. Here, I’ll do it for you:

o,rly? . grey-text { color : # 6d6d6d ; } @media ( prefers-contrast : more) { . grey-text { color : unset; } }

It’s literally that easy! Or, you could just not do it in the first place which would look like this:

much hard, very CSS /* oh... uhhhhh... no code needed at all */

I don’t even technicallly have vision imparement. But the amount of times per day I ask myself if I’m literally going blind, only to find out the “designer” decided for me how I should best read their website.

Still not convinced? Here’s a little “demo” for you:

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