Dark mode, explained without the jargon

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Here is dark mode without the vocabulary that usually surrounds it.

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The short version

Pure black on pure white is harsher than a slightly softened pair. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Why people complicate it

Most of the confusion comes from tooling rather than from the idea itself. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not.

Respect the visitor's system preference before your own default. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

A reasonable first step

Shadows stop working in dark mode, so borders carry the depth. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What this looks like day to day

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. Three things worth confirming about dark mode before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Pure black on pure white is harsher than a slightly softened pair — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.