5 ms·

Let'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 i

Let'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 ago
Flat 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 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.
  - 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/
    - notadoc 7y ago
      The polar extremes are good examples? Hardly. Design is much like politics right now, it's hilariously sad when there is no concept of moderation or a middle ground.
jawns 7y ago
Terminals and IDEs predated flat design by decades, and yet darker themes have always been around for those. I really don't think dark mode is merely a response to flat design.
- redisman 7y ago
  Terminals have almost always been dark mode. MS DOS is a great example of a very popular OS that was fully dark mode. Or any installation of Unix or Linux without a window manager. Tying it to flat-design just sounds like a lack of familiarity with the history of computer interface design.
  - tedunangst 7y ago
    SunOS boots up dark on light.
- majormajor 7y ago
  Even Apple's been toying with similar things since the mid-90s, with Copland and the "Hi-Tech" theme. https://www.flickr.com/photos/maclab/488943849 https://www.flickr.com/photos/maclab/488943849 Windows made it pretty easy to roll your own dark mode in the 9x days, and Kaleidoscope was around for Mac users.
  - kitsunesoba 7y ago
    I really miss Kaleidoscope. No OS theming system I’ve come across since has been as smooth and all-encompassing — WinXP/Win7 msstyles and the various themeable bits in a Linux desktop come closest, but still fall short because they’re often incomplete and using them is a multi-step process. With Kaleidoscope, you just double-clicked the scheme file in the Finder and _everything_ was themed, from window frames to buttons to fonts to icons, and there were practically no limits to what scheme designers could do. There were a lot of impractical schemes, sure, but they were creative, fun, and personal in a way computer UI hasn’t been in ages. Just take scroll through the tweets of this Kaleidoscope twitter bot for a taste: https://mobile.twitter.com/kaleidoscopemac https://mobile.twitter.com/kaleidoscopemac
kube-system 7y ago
While I have always been skeptical of "flat" designs, I'm not so sure that "dark mode" is a bandaid. I think it's something needed on its own, but flat designs just happen to be caught up in the mix. White-background designs are really just a hold-over from design approaches developed for paper. Whereas white is a default color for paper, it never was on CRTs, and isn't on OLED displays either. The design choice was mostly an implicit (or habitual) emulation of paper. There are both hardware and ocular reasons why dark backgrounds are advantageous on screens, particularly mobile OLEDs. Power consumption, eye fatigue, contrast, durability, etc. We need to make some of these changes regardless of artistic design style.
- notadoc 7y ago
  Somewhat ironically, OLED PWM causes eye fatigue and other problems in a significant number of users. Anyway, dark backgrounds and dark interfaces can and did exist without participating in the flat design trend.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Interesting, flicker around 240Hz on some screens causing problems while some premium non-OLED displays flicker at that rate on purpose. Still, simple enough to solve that by cranking the PWM frequency to 2KHz or 20KHz.
    - willis936 7y ago
      Normally the thing that prevents higher refresh rates in PWM is the time constant. Considering OLED has a response time of a few microseconds. You could probably get away with a 1-2 kHz strobe without adding a noticeable amount of blur. What I want to see is higher refresh rates to avoid apparent blur from sample and old.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  You may be right that dark modes are advantageous for some people, but please don't assume that this is true for everyone. In particular, dark modes may become more difficult as you get older. I'm 67 and I have a great deal of trouble reading text in a dark mode. There is a physiological reason for this, and if you do any photography using manual aperture control you may be familiar with it. Very high quality lenses should be sharp whether the iris is wide open or stopped down. But mediocre lenses have trouble wide open and give better sharpness stopped down to a more narrow aperture. As you get older, the lenses in your eyes are not as good as they were when you were younger. There is a benefit in sharpness to have your irises stopped down instead of wide open. Light modes accomplish this. The background light naturally triggers your irises to stop down, resulting in a sharper and more detailed view. Dark modes encourage your irises to open wider, reducing your visual acuity. Of course many people do enjoy dark modes, so there will never be a way to please everyone! But please consider not making dark mode your only mode.

gdubs 7y ago

Flat 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 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.
- 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/
  - notadoc 7y ago
    The polar extremes are good examples? Hardly. Design is much like politics right now, it's hilariously sad when there is no concept of moderation or a middle ground.

jawns 7y ago

Terminals and IDEs predated flat design by decades, and yet darker themes have always been around for those. I really don't think dark mode is merely a response to flat design.

redisman 7y ago
Terminals have almost always been dark mode. MS DOS is a great example of a very popular OS that was fully dark mode. Or any installation of Unix or Linux without a window manager. Tying it to flat-design just sounds like a lack of familiarity with the history of computer interface design.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  SunOS boots up dark on light.
majormajor 7y ago
Even Apple's been toying with similar things since the mid-90s, with Copland and the "Hi-Tech" theme. https://www.flickr.com/photos/maclab/488943849 https://www.flickr.com/photos/maclab/488943849 Windows made it pretty easy to roll your own dark mode in the 9x days, and Kaleidoscope was around for Mac users.
- kitsunesoba 7y ago
  I really miss Kaleidoscope. No OS theming system I’ve come across since has been as smooth and all-encompassing — WinXP/Win7 msstyles and the various themeable bits in a Linux desktop come closest, but still fall short because they’re often incomplete and using them is a multi-step process. With Kaleidoscope, you just double-clicked the scheme file in the Finder and _everything_ was themed, from window frames to buttons to fonts to icons, and there were practically no limits to what scheme designers could do. There were a lot of impractical schemes, sure, but they were creative, fun, and personal in a way computer UI hasn’t been in ages. Just take scroll through the tweets of this Kaleidoscope twitter bot for a taste: https://mobile.twitter.com/kaleidoscopemac https://mobile.twitter.com/kaleidoscopemac

kube-system 7y ago

While I have always been skeptical of "flat" designs, I'm not so sure that "dark mode" is a bandaid. I think it's something needed on its own, but flat designs just happen to be caught up in the mix. White-background designs are really just a hold-over from design approaches developed for paper. Whereas white is a default color for paper, it never was on CRTs, and isn't on OLED displays either. The design choice was mostly an implicit (or habitual) emulation of paper. There are both hardware and ocular reasons why dark backgrounds are advantageous on screens, particularly mobile OLEDs. Power consumption, eye fatigue, contrast, durability, etc. We need to make some of these changes regardless of artistic design style.

notadoc 7y ago
Somewhat ironically, OLED PWM causes eye fatigue and other problems in a significant number of users. Anyway, dark backgrounds and dark interfaces can and did exist without participating in the flat design trend.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Interesting, flicker around 240Hz on some screens causing problems while some premium non-OLED displays flicker at that rate on purpose. Still, simple enough to solve that by cranking the PWM frequency to 2KHz or 20KHz.
  - willis936 7y ago
    Normally the thing that prevents higher refresh rates in PWM is the time constant. Considering OLED has a response time of a few microseconds. You could probably get away with a 1-2 kHz strobe without adding a noticeable amount of blur. What I want to see is higher refresh rates to avoid apparent blur from sample and old.
Stratoscope 7y ago
You may be right that dark modes are advantageous for some people, but please don't assume that this is true for everyone. In particular, dark modes may become more difficult as you get older. I'm 67 and I have a great deal of trouble reading text in a dark mode. There is a physiological reason for this, and if you do any photography using manual aperture control you may be familiar with it. Very high quality lenses should be sharp whether the iris is wide open or stopped down. But mediocre lenses have trouble wide open and give better sharpness stopped down to a more narrow aperture. As you get older, the lenses in your eyes are not as good as they were when you were younger. There is a benefit in sharpness to have your irises stopped down instead of wide open. Light modes accomplish this. The background light naturally triggers your irises to stop down, resulting in a sharper and more detailed view. Dark modes encourage your irises to open wider, reducing your visual acuity. Of course many people do enjoy dark modes, so there will never be a way to please everyone! But please consider not making dark mode your only mode.