BTW. I like light color (wheat yellow) text on a black background.
Ahhh jeeeeze...don't give Michael any ideas huh?
Truth be told, when Michael first launched LuLa (it just celebrated it's 10 birthday recently) the DI industry was still using CRTs and the various sizes and resolutions often dictated that page design for the web have what I would call an EXCESS of built in contrast because of the pixel dithering that CRTs did–which led to a lot of softening in both pages and images on the web. Back then, Michael could make the reasonable argument of "readability" and pretty much win cause the old green/yellow/white/black scheme really did show up even on soft CRTs.
In this day and age where the biggest problems we have with displays is figuring out how to lower the luminance enough to calibrate and profile the damn things is that what was useful (and sometimes needed) on the web in the old days looks garish and are arguably really objectionable on today's displays.
All of which would not contribute enough visual diarrhea to constitute a mass exodus of visual artists from LuLa...which essentially was the point I was trying to make that Michael is seriously giggling (his cohort Chris is also having a good chuckle I would surmise) because while Michael does have an sophisticated aesthetic when it comes to photography and prints, his sense of design of aesthetic is something out of the 1970's. Heck, have you ever seen the shirts Michael wears? What he thinks is hip and trendy is easy to find in thrift shops (a place I sometimes suspect Michael likes to shop at cause he's so friggin' cheep).
All of which comes back to the central theme in this thread...people come here -NOT- for the design aesthetic of the web site but because of the information and the community. Ever notice that Michael's photos look ok even though he does a a really ugly yellow holding rule around the images? Wanna know why? Cause Michael only picks images that look good with a yellow holding rule (DOOOH!!!).
The only way (and I'm really over 1/2 serious here) that this web site would fundamentally change is if monthly unique visitors to the LuLa site monthly fell in numbers a couple months in a row. Now, while sales of "stuff" may have softened...I'll bet the visitor count to the web site hasn't fallen too much (I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually increased in today's economy) because hey, visiting the web site is free (well, except the cost to your eyes if you really, really hate black backgrounds with yellow holding rules!).