Dark color: Things to know about color when adopting dark mode

Maybe some day HN will see the light and implement native dark mode. :)

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!

I like to read a lot during night time, and it was hard not to get burning eyes after a couple of hours.

But I learned about toning down screen brightness as to not get headaches, then I learned about Redshift which it's been a real life---or should I say eyes?---saver.

I even implemented a dark / light mode for my personal blog: https://lobotuerto.com/

Software brightness control on desktop monitors is something I've wanted for a while. Closest thing I've seen is a monitor with a built in light sensor that has the option of auto adjusting independent of the computer.

My main annoyance these days is that Office doesn’t let you invert the colors of a document as a display option. You have to actually change the background and text colors of the document.

I wish operating systems had a feature to invert the colors in a single window/app, as a fallback for when an application doesn’t have a dark mode.

That way you'll never be forced to see a website in bright white again.

[1] - https://userstyles.org/styles/163880/global-dark-style-every...

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.

They only do this because the iOS UI uses darkening to indicate depth, with no alternatives for dark mode - it has to be something other than pure black or there's nothing to darken. It's a band-aid.

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)

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.

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.

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/uiuserinterf...

Building out a dark mode in your app has been readily possible for a long time now. You could've done it years ago.

But you like the idea of it being "global"? You mean, integrated with the rest of the OS, so that when the OS is in dark mode, your app is in dark mode? And you somehow want Apple to introduce that feature without introducing a new version of the OS? How does that work?

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.

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.