Personas And Text Legibility

Mark Surman wisely observed today that there are two sorts of people in the world – those who skin their desktop, browser, media player, etc. and those who don’t. I am firmly in the second camp. However, I was persuaded to try out Personas. These have been incredibly popular, so I was amazed at how simple they were – just two images.

However, after a few hours I switched them off, for one reason – they made the text of the status bar and bookmarks bar harder to read. It seems that a persona can change this text colour, but with a graphical background, one colour is often not suitable for the entire length of the text.

Could this be fixed using text drop shadows? Do those work in XUL?

5 thoughts on “Personas And Text Legibility

  1. Drop shadows would solve that problem, yes. And TTBOMK, you can use the same new CSS text shadow support in XUL that you can in HTML.

  2. I have the same problem, and so my PC is permanently seasonal, switching between the easter and snowman personas (the only two which are anywhere near pleasing to my jaded eye).

    Phil

  3. I find “Firefox B” to also be very legible, and prefer it for exactly this reason. And light blue and yellow make a comfortable color combination, too.

  4. Drop shadows work on most XUL in Firefox 3.5, but there are gotchas because the XUL layout engine doesn’t know about them, so you need to work around it whenever you want wrapped text with drop shadow. (Fixed in Firefox 3.Next).

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