Shadows in dark mode is an interesting design topic. Experimenting quickly gets to you 'inconsistencies' with well-known principles that work in light mode, ot

Shadows 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)