Agreed. And if black is artificial, so is white, but we use black and white when designing color schemes for a couple of legitimate reasons.
White and black provide constant contrasts to which we can fix all other colors. Our brains see color by contrast, and we process color by contrast. If I have some white, some black, and some blue on a page, chances are that people will see a similar shade of blue on different monitors even if the correction is very different. The color temperature may be different on different monitors but our brain adjusts. White and black provide the tare points.
I'd note that the paintings he included in his page, I could spot black on two out of three......
If you're on a Mac, go to spotlight and open Digital Color Meter. There is no black (0,0,0) in any of those paintings. The blacks you "see" are exactly the subject of this article and parent comment.
While we're noting things, I couldn't help but continually note that the text on your website is damn hard to read. I'd rather have legible pure black text than text with such low contrast that I have to spend more effort to accommodate it.
"Design" is supposed to be a beautiful blend of form and function, and I find it hard to take advice seriously from a website that doesn't care about the latter.
I didn't notice at first because this particular article doesn't have that much text, but if you click around ... ouch, yeah no way I'm going to read more than two paragraphs of light-grey text no matter if it's carefully saturated with some warm brown colour or not.
Though also note that many of the letters in the menubar text do indeed contain #000000 black, at least in Lion (no time to upgrade yet). Why? Because the contrast works – particularly given the non-white background.
In my experience, it's far more rare to find a person who knows and uses any keyboard shortcuts.
When I run training sessions I'm amazed at how many people don't even know the shortcuts for copy and paste. And these are folks that use computers for 80-90% of their workday.
this probably means you need to calibrate your monitor a little bit better. no need to use an expensive (spyder) tool unless you're a graphics artist, but if "not black" shows up as pure black, you might want to do some simple adjustments to at least make sure you can see a full colour range (just google "monitor calibration", there's many simple tutorials).
White and black provide constant contrasts to which we can fix all other colors. Our brains see color by contrast, and we process color by contrast. If I have some white, some black, and some blue on a page, chances are that people will see a similar shade of blue on different monitors even if the correction is very different. The color temperature may be different on different monitors but our brain adjusts. White and black provide the tare points.
I'd note that the paintings he included in his page, I could spot black on two out of three......