Any luck keeping a balck and white kitchen floor clean?

[Anonymous]

Am working with my young adult daughter to redo her apartment kitchen. She'd love to have a black and white checkerboard floor. The squares would need to be 8 or 6 inches as the kitchen is quite small. I love the idea too as it fits the era of the apartment building, but have read a number of mentions of difficulty in keeping such a floor clean.

Any experience with this? I'd prefer ceramic tile over vinyl (owing to a bad past experience with trying to keep a vinyl floor clean) and see that encaustic cement tiles would also be an option but am not sure how practical that would be. Would using black or dark grout solve the problem?

Would appreciate any feedback positive or negative.