how dark mode killed good design

Why do I feel like I’ve watched this video before…?

I used to be a huge dark mode lover, but my partner convinced me to move back to light mode a few months ago. I feel less depressed using my computer and phone. Otherwise, I’ve felt no effects so I just stuck with light mode.

That’s my experience, I’m not saying it will be the same for anyone else.

When I learned programming, e.g. in Turbo Pascal, the IDE had one mode, and while it definitely wasn't light mode, it would be a stretch to call it dark mode: We had yellow letters on a dark blue background. And the thing is, this worked great, and if there were no syntax hightlighting, I would honestly give it a go even today. For some reason, it seems to be the best of both worlds: light enough to make it easy to focus, clearly distinct colors (picked up by different cone cells in your eyes), a good but not too crazy contrast.

Please… talk about your steampunk fase 🛐

I've been using dark mode for years but I switched to light maybe 3 is months ago and I'm not mad

She reminds me of Denki. She could be his sister. The way she talks & edits. Mirror image of Denki’s channel but WAY more creative. I love it! Instant subscriber. Thanks for the great content! ❤️

Dark text on light background is proven to be easier to read for people with astigmatism which is… like half of all people.

Beyond that, the obsession with dark modes (because many people just assume them to be better for no reason, same way you did) leads to worse "light" modes.
See discord redesigning its default theme from regular bright with dark text to eye searing white only garbage.

It creates this landscape where shitty UX designers don't use most of the tools they can to make light and dark mode as opposite, yet simple to manage, as possible.

Consider this: our hunter-gatherer ancestors would etch symbols and drawings into stones under the dim glow of firelight or the evening sky. This was, in essence, the original "dark mode." They worked in low-light conditions to avoid attracting predators (joke — besides fire that is holding them back there was nothing brighter back then) and to protect their night vision … now at some point they would have to stop drawing and actually go about the daily work .. Maybe if we have to use dark mode during the day, keeping it more "light" may be a compromise (Grey backgrounds etc.)?

Just have Themes, and I can choose the one I prefer at any one time …

The real question is: Why is your brightness on max?

Also you skipped over MicroFiche

Dark mode is superior because it makes me sneeze less (:

There actually is a study that was recently published about the light mode of phones and its effect. And if I remember it correctly, then there is a difference, but not a large one. The main problem is the amount of light and closeness to the screen, not the screen colour.

I only use dark mode cuz it's easier on my eyes. I use it all day and night

They didn't release iOS 18, they just ANNOUNCED it. There are currerntly only developer preview betas.

I don’t know, I feel like using dark mode during the day just kinda makes my eyes hurt more, like I’m straining to read the text and then the world is a lot brighter than my screen. Taha is right, light mode is good when it’s light and dark mode is good when it’s dark.

Also, I don’t understand the anti-light Discord people. It looks just fine imo

The most important thing is customization. Apps and websites choose their colors based on attention-grabbing and branding – few truly consider usability. What works for one person doesn't work for another. Alternate color schemes are relatively new to OSes and have always been quite limited (more so now than in the days of Windows 3.1). The vast majority of apps and damn near every website has absolutely no support for anything other than their baked-in color scheme. These are typically very high contrast – black and white with some bold, stand out colors. They grab your attention in a store, while scrolling, or when shown in a demo. But these extremely high contrast color palettes cause a lot of fatigue. More neutral color palettes with less color saturation and less range of luminance are easier to read and cause less fatigue.

The same goes for font sizes, and fonts in general. Many fonts are chosen because they look pretty – not because they are easy to read. Most are "fine", but people with vision impairment and especially dyslexia have a lot of trouble with most common fonts. Different sizes of screens with different resolutions call for different font sizes. For information-dense applications, small fonts can allow for more information on screen at once, but larger fonts tend to be easier to read (up to a point). For people with impaired vision, larger fonts are often easier to read – and 150-200% larger is not nearly large enough for many older people. Things that are meant to be glanced at quickly – phone screens, car dashboards, road signs – should have large text with easily distinguishable characters and quite high contrast so they can be seen and read quickly. Things that you stare at for hours on end should be softer to avoid fatigue.

There is no one size fits all. Designers who insist on making their picture perfect layout with every single aspect locked down are making something that looks pretty to them but awful for everyone else. They don't adapt to lighting conditions, vision impairments, screen sizes, or the way in which users are viewing it.

In the early days of the web, HTML gave the content and the browser chose how to render the graphics. You could customize it to your hearts content and it generally worked well. The tags were largely denoted semantics, not strictly the graphical representation. Rather than making things easier, we've made them more rigid, taking any customization and accessibility out of the user's hands.

Modern design should focus on making content that is accessible to everyone, rather than making art that only works when viewed under very specific conditions. The devices and the applications should adapt to the user rather than requiring the user to adapt to the application.

2:21 You know, there also is something like an ear strain… — that was what came to my mind after three seconds of listening to your high pitched voice 😉

Dark mode was even early than regular black and white CRTs, which were raster scanning (the electron beam moves side to side). Vector monitors drew the letters onto the screen, much like like you drawing a letter. The phosphors(green) would remain lit for a few minutes on a dark screen, refreshing itself after a period of time. Others would have the phosphors loose brightness in milliseconds and be refreshed at 30-40 times a second. The original Asteroids arcade game used this tech.

8:40 – Apple effect, whatever a perceived tech leader does is emulated. People then try to profit on the knockoff

…oh man, I wanted to hear about the pandas dataframe… 😢

I'm a software developer and Sabrina needs to repeat that last part louder for those in the back.

So much of modern design – web, mobile, and desktop – is about fancy and flashy. Long scrolling pages with full screen stock photo images and a single line of text that morphs rather than scrolls because boy did that look cool the first hundred times you saw it. Buttons and icons that went from simple boxes to 3D to alpha blended gradients and now to completely monochrome and no borders – an evolution from contrast and clarity to completely ignoring gestalt principles. Menus and windows full of options whose behaviour is largely undocumented and whose purpose is entirely unknown other than some salesperson or executive said that a customer wanted it. Animated splash screens, pop up "assistants", windows that fade in and out painfully slowly. People wonder why computers seem slower even though the processing power is orders of magnitude greater, and while the common answer is that it's lazy programming, the real answer is that there's so much superfluous crap layered on to everything.

The Nintendo Switch can boot in less than 10 seconds. It can perform an update in less than a minute. My laptop takes over 2 minutes before everything in Windows has finished loading and my mobile phone – while objectively much simpler – takes even longer. Hell, the smart watch I used to have took over 3 minutes to boot up! What could it possibly be doing?

We are all magpies; we are attracted to shiny things. Salespeople and executives know this, so they keep filling our microwaves and our cars and our mobile devices with more and more shiny crap whose only purpose is to look cool. So much of it sounds great on paper, but inevitably makes things more complicated, less reliable, and less enjoyable overall.

This isn't a slag against technology – I went into software development because I recognize and am passionate about the ways that electronics and computers can enhance our lives. And this isn't a bid for returning to some "better past" or to strive for minimalism. Instead, it's a call to designers, developers, and customers to consider how much each of these features actually helps them in their lives and to demand software and devices that give us the valuable features while leaving out all the flashy fluff. This will make things simpler and easier while simultaneously making them faster, more reliable, and more capable.

Why did Apple make it so you could tint all your icons? Who asked for this? Who does it help? Maybe nobody, but I bet at least a few people went "ooooh" when they first saw it. Mission accomplished.

So ur telling me that the real Dark mode Vs Light mode is the friends we made along the way???

The real killer of good design is thinking "light mode" has to be an entirely white background with black text and "dark mode" has to be an entirely dark grey background with white text. What we've lost since the early 2000s is color and creativity in our interfaces, which is severely lacking in many of today's monochrome and "clean" designs.

Dark mode for the win because the phone appears less shiny, and I can put it down when I am done with the work that I intend to do and don't get sucked into the trap of overstimulation. Go one step further and get a launcher app to remove icons and turn on greyscale mode from settings. I care for design but I care for my focus and mental wellbeing so much more 🙂