Logo in gold on yellowish/cream background? its the same color category!
What matters for readability is value contrast, not hue contrast. In fact, in extreme cases, too much hue contrast can make for less readability because different colors have different wavelengths which can cause them to be slightly out-of-focus on your retina:
i think the takeaway here is that the (100% subjective) design of their site benefited from (again, subjectively!) somebody that wasn't slavish to these sorts of prescriptives (although perhaps slavish to their own aesthetic, but whatever).
the reason startup websites look like the 'before' is because for whatever reason, everyone's told that there's this certain blue that projects confidence and whatever. the background is white and the text is #444 because of another mandate from heaven (h&fj) and so forth.
The reality is that while maybe black on 'weird textured background' may be technically harder to read than black on white, it's nonetheless legible. Somebody made the point that what really matters is whether this new site converts better. Whatever.
At some level, design is a matter of taste. They like their new site, you don't. Agree to disagree, but it's not like these things are 100% set in stone. I mean, everyone used to think fraktur was highly legible but something (tschichold?) eventually changed. Who knows.
I think this is a fair summary of what we're getting at. There's still plenty of usability stuff we need to work on. The focus of this article was on emotional design. Based on initial feedback (and somewhat anecdotally) I think we built something that elicits a better response from users. Agree that much of it is fashion.
Black on weird textured background for the body? do not use textures for background - like - ever - if you're going to write text on it
Then gold text on cream again.
Design legend much?
The rest is ok and there's some actually good tips but what I listed is totally noobish.