jayeless
jayeless
Some Thoughts on Dark Mode jayeless.net
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kjz
kjz

@jayeless Thanks, that’s a really good article. The description of reading a high contrast dark theme was interesting.

Thinking about this issue from the perspective of a reader, I can’t help but wonder whether leaving it to the web designer to pick colour schemes, fonts and so on is really the best way.

In theory, CSS allows designers to access OS colour settings for links, background colours, foregrounds and all sorts of controls, thereby leaving these decisions to the readers. I’d be really keen to use this, but browser implementation is patchy.

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In reply to
artkavanagh
artkavanagh

@jayeless @leonp @AlanGMarz Jessica wrote:

I can’t stand most layouts that put bright text on dark backgrounds, so I don’t use dark mode.

I’ve certainly noticed over recent years that most sites now use some approximation of black text on a white background. I find it (relatively) boring and samey but, more to the point, I’d just like to get away from the “printed page” metaphor. So, I’m generally guilty of using light coloured text on a darker background. I hope that people don’t find it hard to read but I think that font weight, line length and line height make more of a difference to readability. And there’s always Reader View.

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kjz
kjz

@artkavanagh the red and honeydew combination looks really nice, although the contrast is maybe a bit low (I make it 3.73:1). The large text helps with that, though.

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artkavanagh
artkavanagh

@leonp Thanks for the comment. I’ll think about the contrast. I’ve considered darkening the background a little bit but it’s so easy to mess things up that I’m cautious about changing things.

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jayeless
jayeless

@leonp Thank you. I had no idea CSS had that feature, and it looks interesting, although still not quite as detailed as letting people set their own preferred UI colours in a setting. The spottiness of browser implementations also poses an issue, as you say.

@Alangmarz When I visit your blog it's set to light mode by default, so I hadn't even noticed! 😊 It's great to give options to people though, I think, and "light grey on dark grey" shouldn't be too high-contrast for a dark mode.

@artkavanagh I had been going to talk a little more about the "sameyness" of much of the modern web, but it wasn't really about dark mode so I took it out... I do agree though, it's refreshing to see some people doing more unique things than the one-column black-on-white (even if I don't have an issue with that kind of layout per se... it's just that it's everywhere now).

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