Getting started with dark mode
There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. A short on-ramp to dark mode for teams who have not touched it before.
Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.
Why it matters
Pure black on pure white is harsher than a slightly softened pair. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Respect the visitor's system preference before your own default
- Change one thing and measure it
Shadows stop working in dark mode, so borders carry the depth. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
In practice
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
- Respect the visitor's system preference before your own default — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.