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Dark color: Things to know about color when adopting dark mode
- Zekio 7y agoWell you can have "Shadows" in dark mode, though they would have to be shadows made of white or light grey rather than black at least that is how I usually do it. Not sure how you would accomplish this in IOS, never done IOS development.
- K0SM0S 7y agoShadows in dark mode is an interesting design topic. Experimenting quickly gets to you 'inconsistencies' with well-known principles that work in light mode, otherwise simply the 'full color scale' so to speak. It goes to show that light/dark mode cannot be a symmetry, it's a chiral* transformation of the color space. [* chiral is my way of saying it's like left/right, the two spaces do not map directions the same, e.g. "from object color towards absence of color", what we call a shadow, should theoretically remain the same direction in any "mode"; e.g. a 'lighter shadow' feels unnatural, and feels more like a 'highlight'.] My personal take is that dark mode lends itself very badly to using black as the 'normal' / background color; it produces too much contrast if you want colors to be decently saturated, and doesn't leave any room 'beyond' (darker than back is impossible) for things like shadows or a "depth effect". Thus dark grey is the way to go usually; and most of the usual rules of 'light modes' apply (shadows to black, highlight 'lighter', invertable selections etc; the only meaningful remaining changes are thus related to fonts, whose 'Light' parameter l becomes its complementary k in the n-bit range (typically k = 2⁸-l). And you'd usually slightly darken or desaturate colors in general to reduce contrast for eye comfort. You essentially retrieve a 'full color scale' space to work with, you're no longer bound to >50% light for anything that should be visible. It's a really interesting topic, I find. Speaking as programmer with no design background nor particular talent. (just a demanding taste for aesthetics I guess)
- on_and_off 7y agoNot sure how iOS does it either, since shadows are not the best in dark mode, Android has opted to use lighter shades for the upper layers when in this mode. Basically if you use pure black for the background, it will be #000000 if elevation = 0 and get slowly lighter from there for each dp of elevation.
- xori 7y agoNot a fan, of the "don't use black, use dark-grey" mentality. As an alternative, may I recommend "back lighting" your windows. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/97/1e/31/971e311093599ce52b9919571d69b0db.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/97/1e/31/971e311093599ce52b99...
- notadoc 7y agoAlso, dark blue text against black or dark gray is absolutely horrible for legibility.
- yosamino 7y agoFor any poor soul reading this AND regularily reading journalctl output on a black background AND using xterm; Add this to your .Xresources: !makes blue readble on black background XTerm.VT100.color4: CornflowerBlue It made my ... friends life a lot better
- Filligree 7y agoThank you very much. It's going to be very helpful to my... squirrel. Such a silly critter.
- dTal 7y agoIt's a lovely picture, but I can't help but feel that a concrete example with actual windows would be more informative. Do you do this? Can we see a screenshot of your desktop?
- Bartweiss 7y agoCould you clarify what this means on a monitor? It looks great in photos, but if I have light text on a dark background, I don't want to replace that with dark background, dark text, and a halo between the two. More broadly, my experience is just that I can accept higher contrasts in dark-on-light than the reverse. TextEdit light is 0 on 255, and I find it slightly harsh in some lighting. TextEdit dark is only 255 on 30, and even that's enough to be consistently annoying. Sublime's ~248 on ~40 is way more usable for me.
- notadoc 7y agoLet's be honest, dark mode is only necessitated by the whole flat design trend which uses glaringly bright whites and stark interfaces. The flat design trend is so tired, it never looked good, and it promotes bad UX/UI. That has always been my opinion and it has grown only stronger as more bandaids like 'dark mode' are slapped onto it.
- gdubs 7y agoFlat Design is really "Swiss Design" or "International Style", which came about mid-twentieth-century. The usability issues are typically around lack of affordances – e.g., how do I, as a user, know what's tappable if everything is flat. Using color very intentionally is one approach. Dark mode is an accessibility issue. Yes, flat designs can exacerbate the issue – white space being a primary design pattern – but having a dark mode version of something would still be desirable, even if we went back to skeuomorphic design.
- notadoc 7y agoLet's not forget there were many light, medium, and dark interfaces before the flat design trend took over UI, but since those pre-flat interfaces were almost always built around usability rather than some stark design theory, they were user friendly, worked, looked fine, were obvious, and were almost never harsh on the eyes.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- majormajor 7y ago> Let's not forget there were many light, medium, and dark interfaces before the flat design trend took over UI, but since those pre-flat interfaces were almost always built around usability rather than some stark design theory, they were user friendly, worked, looked fine, were obvious, and were almost never harsh on the eyes. This might be sarcasm, but if not: Some highlights of counterexamples include... The Office Ribbon Winamp Windows Media Player Kai's Power Tools QuickTime Player 4 Geocities websites Flash websites ... and many more http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/ http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/
- Railsify 7y agoThe modal example was implemented horribly, you obviously need a border around the dark mode modal. This is a failure in UX.
- gnicholas 7y agoAfter Apple announced Dark Mode, I called up the dev who builds my startup's iOS app. We already had some dark-mode-like features in the app, but with this I was excited to make it global. Then he told me that if we want our iOS 13 users to be able to have a Dark Mode that is tied to the iOS 13 flag, users who are on iOS 12 or earlier. This killed the idea for me — I don't want to force people to upgrade from 12 to 13 (which has many bugs still), and I certainly don't want to cause problems for people with devices that are not supported by iOS 13. I really wish Apple made it possible to give access to this feature without cutting off a significant portion of iOS users (including pretty much all schools, which are critical for us). Existing users can't upgrade, but new purchasers wouldn't be able to download at all.
- vedosity 7y agoI don't think this is true... Apps below iOS 13 won't be able to use the new system-defined UIColors, yes, and users below iOS 13 can't change to the dark-mode using a switch in the Control Center, yes. But you've been able to change the "user interface style" for view controllers since iOS 12 [0]. And you've been able to add UIColors to asset catalogs that change depending on that setting since iOS 12 as well. I'll be honest, I haven't tried this myself. But either this works or Apple's documentation is wrong. [0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiuserinterfacestyle https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiuserinterf...
- skunkworker 7y agoSome apps (Narwhal) give the option to have a dark mode for iOS 12 as well as a UI switch to "Sync night and iOS dark Mode". This is nice because you could give it to pre-ios13 apps, while allowing for ios13+ to have it permanently dark or sync with the global ios setting.
- Kluny 7y agoI don't like dark mode. There are always lots of apps and websites that haven't adopted the color guidelines, so I'll frequently be snapping from dark black/grey to bright white, which is even harder on my eyes than just white all the time. Turning down screen brightness is better I think.
- ratsmack 7y agoIt seems that more people are moving to dark mode. I use Tampermonkey here on HN so I can view it in dark mode. Maybe some day HN will see the light and implement native dark mode. :)
- Causality1 7y agoCompanies can also easily forget lessons previously learned. For example, Firefox's old dark theme was light grey text on dark grey background. Their current default dark theme is blazing white text on dark grey background. It's far less pleasant on the eyes.
- discreteevent 7y agoIn don't like dark mode because I find it slower to scan a large section of code and recognise some pattern I'm looking for. The last time I mentioned this I got some downvotes so what I will say is that perception is one of the areas where just because someone may be one of the few to experience a phenomenon doesn't mean that they are incorrect. It's subjective!
- Ballas 7y agoIn most cases just switching the color scheme will slow you down. So going by that, if you spend enough time in dark mode, switching to light will also be slower.
- account42 7y agoAlso, you can't just reuse the same colors for syntax highlighting in dark mode. Saturation needs to be turned down compared to light mode or everthing looks like a mess of colors.
- 1996 7y agoHow I like dark mode: everywhere! So I configure light mode (black text, white background) everywhere, then I use NegativeScreen for Windows to invert colors. Bonus: you can also setup a transformation matrix to convert all brightness to red, giving you a red-on-black mode for use at night. This is the only reliable way I know to get a perfect dark mode everywhere (in outlook, terminal, notepad...) as many apps don't support dark mode or have some half-assed support, but all of them have light mode now that the start menu also has light colors support (One exception on android: samsung browser get special mention for its dark-mode that applies to all pictures)
- tsm 7y agoWhat about seeing normal images and videos?
- 1996 7y agoIf I'm watching during the day, I press on a key to toggle NegativeScreen on or off. If I'm watching night, I'd rather have a good night of sleep than a colour-correct video. I don't care much about colour accuracy. If you care try the Samsung browser for android. They seem to care about such things.
- chooseaname 7y agoHow about don't use blue text against a black background? Blue is the hardest color for our eyes to focus on and, personally, I do find it harder to read blue text on black than, say, gray on black.
- Nadge 7y agoLots of varied, interesting opinions in this thread. For fans of dark mode, there is a Firefox extension that lets you customise colors of every element, and process the CSS in different ways. Been using it for a few years now, and I prefer it to the Dark Reader extension that Firefox recommends. https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-extension https://github.com/m-khvoinitsky/dark-background-light-text-... (not an affiliate, I just like it.)
- pmoriarty 7y agoTake a look at the Stylish extension, which has hundreds of styles for various websites that users created for it: https://userstyles.org/ https://userstyles.org/ Using such pre-created styles is a lot faster, easier, and more convenient than manually customizing each and every element by hand yourself. Knowing how to do that is, of course, a good skill to have when you actually do want to do something custom for which a pre-rolled style does not exist or when existing styles do something you don't like.
- Nadge 7y agoOh wow, I like that, thank you. I'll get it installed once I'm home and look at contributing in the future :)