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Comment on Ask HN: In your experience, what are sound conventions for e-ink UI development?

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If you are just trying to get something quick and simple that works for rendering react components then this repo is solid:

https://github.com/marcomattes/epaper-components/tree/main

The Bigme is a pretty high quality eink display, but some core properties of eink are present here so I’ll offer some generic guidance:

The contrast on any epaper display is lower than on a modern lcd/oled display. So you want to avoid or modify ui systems that try to diminish contrast for stylistic reasons. Or more explicitly: maximize the contrast wherever legibility matters. It is pretty common in pretty much every modern design system for web/mobile to diminish contrast so you may just need to go in and tweak things yourself.

Second: you cannot rely on color as an accent. A lot of UI does this (submit buttons). Defining a consistent accent pattern is necessary to replace patterns that rely on color. This can be outlines/borders or inversions.

Stylistically I think that sharper content looks better on eink than smoother content, but on a 300 dpi display with 16 grays this is less of a hard point.

Cheers, will check that repo out.

you cannot rely on color as an accent

Yeah definitely found this using some 'normal' webapps, default dark mode makes it worse too.

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