how dark mode killed good design

Bro got me thinking about my blinking for the rest of the video

I have sensitive eyes, so the sudden pop ups of light really hurt And to all the people trying to say to me ways that will ‘fix’ this, dark mode already does that, so just stfu, I couldn’t care less

I adore the vibes of this video. The clarity of thought to ask questions of your questions, the human stakes of proving your friends wrong, the tight script presenting the results of tons of research and academic results without dragging. I found this channel while working on weekend projects like a year ago and those projects have been completely shelved for more than 6 months, but this has got me feeling motivated to dust them back off

I use Eye Comfort mode on every device. This really helped. My night mode filter is set to 75% on Windows, maximum on my phone. You'll get used to it really quickly, you can't go without it after using it a few days.

"when we use our phones, we blink shockingly less than usual" great, now i'll be blinking manually for the rest of the video

There's a hidden unsupported feature in Wikipedia to enable Dark Mode, but it mostly just inverts the colors of everything on the page and attempts to invert-invert any images that were messed up. I use it all the time and love it!

I'm a programmer, so I have to read a lot of digital text during the day in daylight. When I started, I was a dark mode user, but at some point I noticed how my eyes were always very strained and I had to take breaks for my eyes, and that's when I switched. It's just so much more comfortable.

My reason for using light mode wasn't even mentioned: eye burn-in. Lines of bright text on a dark background leave afterimages for quite a long time, which messes with my vision and I find uncomfortable. Light backgrounds have a much more even afterimage, because even dark text is still mostly light space, and therefore don't leave noticable artifacts.

I was one of the only web devs in my office who used light mode. I was nicknamed "Database Admin" (database, for short). It still hurts.

My friends use light mode discord in school so if a teacher glances at their screen he or she wont notice that it's discord, and you can also switch to google classroom or docs without the screen flashing from dark to bright.

10:06 If letters/paper is light mode, we had dark mode way earlier: chalkboards.

I used dark mode for years and recently switched back to light. I enjoy how there's so much more color in the design of icons. Plus some apps have different colored themes you can apply, but only in light mode. This last point is a bit harder to find the right words for, but it also makes things look more solid(?) or "real"(?).

I started having double vision issues a few years ago. My optometrist couldn't identify a problem, and so I started searching the internet for it (I know, sketchy thing to do, but I was desperate). I stumbled across a bunch of posts on reddit about people with bad astigmatism who were noticing that dark mode was causing massive eye strain, and who recommended switching back to light mode. I've been using light mode ever since, and have had no issues with double vision. So no, dark mode isn't always better for your eyes.

If there’s one thing I wish people understood about accessibility and usability in general, it’s that there is no one best design.

I feel like my eyes strain more in dark mode than light. Something about trying to read light words against a dark background, it's like watching TV in a pitch black room.

Apple's primary user base: "Artists and designers", Apple's actual primary user base: "I have a lot of spare money"

I think other was a missed reason for dark mode. Screens universally got brighter so light mode became unpleasant. with CRTs and old LCDs the brightest they got was like... 70 lumens. Now they are in the 300s, and in HDR, possibly over 1000. White backgrounds that were normal and fine in the past really did become flash bangs to people. If light modes had a more parchment like brightness in the background to keep the brightness down, people would find it to not as blinding, and light modes would be more used.

Switching to dark mode is the first thing I do on any device or app that allows it. I could not imagine being swayed. We shall see...

The studies I heard in the 90s (when it came to marketing) was that we read text faster black on white, and our brains have to take an extra moment to focus on white words on black background. So advertisers use black on white more often.

Early computers (like pre-1980s) were all light characters (and later graphics) on dark backgrounds. Early computer graphics were mostly with vector displays, which cannot draw dark lines on light backgrounds. Once graphical user interfaces began to be researched, and we had high-resolution bitmap displays, researchers figured out that “page white” displays with black text was better.* Oh. As I was writing this, we got to 9:30… *In Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” in 1968, where the world first saw the computer mouse, it used a white background.