What to ask your agency about dark mode

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on dark mode, these questions are worth asking early.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Pure black on pure white is harsher than a slightly softened pair. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Shadows stop working in dark mode, so borders carry the depth. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

The short version

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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.