Blue on dark gray looked fine on my phone, failed on my client's projector

I was designing a dashboard for a small finance office in Austin and used a medium blue (#4A90E2) on dark gray (#2C2C2C) for the main text. On my laptop and phone it passed the contrast check easily, but when my client showed it on their conference room projector last Tuesday, the numbers basically vanished. I learned that projectors and older monitors wash out colors way more than screens, so now I test at 50 percent brightness before I send anything. Has anyone else had colors pass on a monitor but fail in a real room?

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miles_jackson918d ago

So you're testing contrast on a screen that's made to show colors accurately? That's the issue right there. Projectors aren't calibrated like that, they just throw light at a wall and hope for the best. What passes on a backlit screen is always gonna look worse on a projector, especially blues and grays since they're close in brightness values. I'd bump up that blue to something way lighter or use a near black background instead, and check the contrast on a matte surface too. The 50 percent brightness trick helps, but also try turning off the lights in the room you're testing in.