>There’s an obvious caveat to the comment about the human eye preferring dark objects against a light background. Apart from a few exceptions like fire, lightning, and bioluminescent fireflies, almost nothing in the natural world emits light. In our modern world, however, screens do emit light, and quite a lot of it.
This for me is the crux of dark mode and is where this post falls flat: devices are just simply a different beast. They aren't newspapers or photographs, they are lamps with a color profile hotter than the Sun, and we should treat them differently. That's especially true of mobile devices, where being used before sunrise/after sunset is typical.
It's not the same, but it reminds me of how we think and talk about color (additive versus subtractive). Finger painting as a kid you learn that mixing the three colors — Red, Yellow, and Blue — makes black, but play with a computer and you'll learn that the three colors — Red, Green, and Blue — make white. It's a different system because, simply put, it's an entirely different system.
Agreed. This article is frustrating because, while yes I do in general like black text on white background, I definitely do not when the background emits hot white light into my eyes.
Strangely, the same can be true for plain old fashioned paper. The other day I was outside and had to look at a paper. Plain, white printed paper with black text. The bright hot sun reflected off of the paper and I couldn't see anything. A darker shaded advertisement however was easy to read.
So it's all relative. In my case I just prefer not to feel bright light blinding me, so I spend most of my time in dark mode editors/etc. My biggest complaint is that websites don't let me choose. I really wish OSs would start enforcing full dark or light modes as an accessibility feature. As I wright this, my HN screen is quite bright. I frequently flip between my dark editor and my bright Slack work screen. Those bright flips kill me.
If you can read something from paper, light got reflected from that paper. To the eye, it doesn't really make a difference if the paper was the original emitter of the light or not. With a newspaper or a photograph, you still see the light from a lamp, just reflected.
> they are lamps with a color profile hotter than the Sun, and we should treat them differently. That's especially true of mobile devices, where being used before sunrise/after sunset is typical.
Well said! VLC (at least on Android) has a day-night theme that switches between dark/light modes at sunrise / sunset. I wish more applications did the same.
Every article like this ignores the fact that Dark Mode is a fantastic accessibility feature if you have a vision impairment that results in ghosting/blurring/light-sensitivity. Features like "Dark Mode" are not about brightness, but contrast.
I'm all for giving people the option. Assuming everyone is able is a crux of UI/UX design.
> Features like "Dark Mode" are not about brightness, but contrast.
Exactly.
Something that the article doesn’t seem to pick up on is how we read and dark modes effect on that depends on what we’re reading. (The musician example doesn’t quite do it justice).
AKAIK We see the shapes of words first, then some of the letters, then we understand the word. Hence why if y-u blank -ut s-me /etters, y-u can sti// read a sentence.
I find light on dark easier to navigate with code because the “shapes” are easier to determine.
Code is highly structured - even different variable names have different shapes.
Having said that...
Reading a full on research paper or something has to be dark on light for me. I’m reading something with less structure, where the words are one after the other.
So... yeah. It’s context and task dependent. So it’s a good thing there’s a choice.
This is a very good point, personally I do not like dark mode (but have used it for many years as a developer, before swapping back). But the OPTION for a user to display a page in dark mode is absolutely not a 'dark side'.
Optional settings are the beauty of software, they shouldn't be shunned but encouraged.
This is exactly correct. I have an astigmatism which causes chromatic abberation. Specifically, the B in RGB is usually out of focus when the R is in focus, although I can actually force my eyes to focus on the B and cause the opposite to occur.
This has been exacerbated by my recent "graduation" to progressive glasses. For whatever reason these seem to cause their own chromatic abberation issues.
Dark mode actually makes the fringing a bigger problem, but I configure everything not to use blues significantly and so it overall makes things more readable for me.
Is it? Because I’m fairly nearsighted and have astigmatism, which can make text on screens very blurry when there is a low contrast, and it’s a lot worse with dark mode.
Still, I agree that having both a light and a dark mode is better than having just one of them.
For me it’s also about decluttering the UI (for want of a better term). Dark mode lets the UI get out of the way, especially if the actual workspace or content remains light. The MacOS mail client is a decent enough example - you can have dark UI but still render the email as light on dark.
Writing code in a dark mode for as long as I can remember, I thought that I'd always prefer light text on dark background when reading text on a screen, but eventually I realized that I prefer dark text on light background for almost everything, except reading code. I like using syntax highlighting and for me colorful text on a light background, no matter the quality of the color theme, is harder to read than the inverse.
This stuff is very subjective but for me if you have to use something like jsx where there is a lot of structure/punctuation then dark mode does make it easier to spot that mismatched bracket. But overall I prefer light mode because I can scan across pages of code much quicker and find what I want. The broader layout is more apparent to me.
For the same reason I definitely prefer to read long form text in light mode. Which means that I would have to switch between dark and light mode anyway (even if most web content was switchable to dark mode). So it's light mode for me with at most #F5F5F5 background for code
Dark mode isn't popular because it's hip, but because it's used. Apple follows tredns here, not set them. The reverse assumption in the article makes me doubt the rest.
I don't trust results that say black on white put less strain on their eyesight and general congnitive stress, because I've personally consistently felt different. At best it depends on surrounding both backgrounds and light sources.
This is silly. Dark mode isn't about marginal differences in speed-of-visual-processing. It's about reducing eye strain, which is a different thing. My eyes physically hurt less when I'm using a dark theme. I really couldn't care less if my brain takes an extra few milliseconds to process what I'm looking at.
It's also about information density. The brain can discern so many different shades of color if they're not all washed out by a blinding white background. Or any lighter-than-the-text background.
Shoes are indeed bad for you. They are good for you NOW because all your life you've been walking on shoes.
If you were walking barefoot all your life, you'd have strong feet, as evolution wanted.
Low light condition is actually awful for your eyes. I can use drive without glasses in the morning, but at night I really need them, because our eyes are designed for day light conditions.
Did you read the article? It actually points to numerous scientific studies that show that light mode is better.
And by better I mean (from the article):
"Light Mode provides better performance in focusing of the eye, identifying letters, transcribing letters, text comprehension, reading speed, and proofreading performance, and at least some older studies suggest that using a positive polarity display results in less visual fatigue and increased visual comfort."
> The human eyes and brain prefer dark-on-light, and reversing that forces them to work harder to read text, parse controls, and comprehend what you’re seeing.
If you've ever had an eye injury or been visually impaired and had to use a computer screen, you'll know the author is just plain wrong here. Absolutely amazing the author cites zero studies dealing with visual impairment.
My anecdote: injured my epithilium in both eyes, almost went blind; looking at a computer screen produced unbearable pain that was only marginally tolerable in dark mode. Developed new empathy for visually impaired people.
The author lost me as soon as he/she compared dark mode to green screen crt. Do you really think the green crt was a design decision?? It was the balance of cost to performance that 1970s tech allowed.
As for the other points, its largely subjective but I have dark mode enabled in every app that will support it. On windows, I run the experimental build so I can have more complete dark mode support, and enabled the half baked dark mode in sql server management studio. All my IDEs are set to dark mode, because eye strain is a thing and for me at least dark mode is much easier on the eyes.
As soon as there were raster CRTs, there wasn't much of a technical reason for light on black. Continuing with this was probably more for tradition and aesthetical expectations ("the gloom of the monitor" and a certain kind of heroism, which goes with it).
Personally, I don't think there is an ideal solution to match all scenarios. There are some applications, where light on black may be superior, and others, where it's the other way round. Empirically, for content-heavy, lengthy text we had a few trends for light on black in the past (e.g. "cool web design" in the late 1990s) and reversed from this soon each time. For an example, I much prefer reading HN comments as-is as compared to a hypothetical dark mode UI.
> Do you really think the green crt was a design decision??
I think the point they are making is, why would we have ever moved away from the technologically simpler option if it also happened to be a better design? What made us get rid of terminal colours in favour of black-on-white, when we could have just improved the design of the white-on-black colours?
I used to have perfect vision - I could see an amber LED display the size of an A3 sheet showing the time from 100m away. And remember preferring dark mode then.
Now that my vision has somewhat deteriorated with age and I use glasses for driving during the night, I find dark mode annoying and blurry.
There is a significant physiological advantage to black text on white background. A bright background causes your pupil to constrict, which reduces the active area of your lens focusing light onto your fovea. Using less lens area reduces the affect of any lens imperfections, which results in a sharper image. If your lens is nearly perfect, you likely don't notice a difference. If you have significant imperfections, the difference is probably very noticeable.
Edit: The effect is similar to a pinhole occluder used by an ophthalmologist to test your eyes without the affect of refractive errors from imperfections in your eye lenses. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_occluder
I don't believe the (recent) move in customers for requesting dark mode in pages, programs and apps allows for that broad statement:
> Vision research has shown that humans prefer dark-on-light.
There are obviously quite many humans who don't. Even if it's scientifically better or god knows what.
I do that. Prefer light-on-dark. Everywhere. I want to paint it black! It's not a hip, style thing. I'm not hip or stylish. I just hate the white and as a day moves on, my hate for that becomes greater. And yes I know about the programs that make your screen brightness lower. I have it on my home PC (and I don't like the yellowish tone...but it's better than nothing I guess). I can't have it on my work PC.
If I look at a white background I get eye strain and headaches. And if I look at a co workers screen while standing I can’t read the text. But with dark background I don’t get eye strain and headaches.
I always hated the bright background on computers. The green or amber old PC screens were better. The first program for inverting the colors I wrote on my first homecomputer, Atari ST. Since then I always look for something handy to switch to dark mode on my computers, even if they don't have a built in way of doing it. The one I'm using now is f.lux, working good enough for me. I can let it run normal colors when I start up some art program so I get correct colors and automatically switch back to red when I go to the darkmode editor. I also make sure I turn down the brightness on the screen as much as possible since that is a bright lamp shining at you for 8 hours per day.
My eyes are deteriorating with age too so this is getting more and more important. That blue light is not good for your retina. There are glasses with filter so you get the blue filtered out everywhere, might be something to look into soon I guess.
first they argue that the MOAD and Xerox' Smalltalk pioneered dark-on-light after years of the reverse, then they argue that actually it's because vision-psychology. Well, which is it? Because there's no way the MOAD and Smalltalk chose dark-on-light because of visual perception research. Smalltalk's choice was probably motivated by a desire to make the UI look like paper (Xerox being in the paper business). Same with Apple's original Mac. At the time everyone's UI was paper so this familiar UI was important to replicate to sell.
It also ignores the fact that we've had light-on-dark mode for ages: blueprints and microfiche, blackboards and granite tablets
This is a very narrow argument, it's well know how much eye strain is caused by staring into a full screen LED all day.
A darkmode allows concentration and focus over longer periods without strain that completely outweigh any reduced focus due to slightly worse perceived contrast... not to mention how much better rested you will be after using darkmode before bed.
Dark mode has certainly a "cool" vibe to it. It reminds me much of when light text on dark (mostly black) background was the hype for cool internet pages in the late 1990s. Incidentally, this trend ceased to be much of thing over the course of a year or so – for some reason.
Dark Mode looks nice to me at night, but I don’t particularly care for it during the day. I save myself the hassle by having a Launch Agent automatically switch between the two around sunset and sunrise.
Personally I find light-on-dark to be much easier on my eyes over the course of the day, and especially at night. With light-on-dark, I can turn the screen brightness up higher without it hurting my eyes.
Regarding the "dramatic new look" angle, what I find hilarious about this is remembering the vaporware that was MacOS Copland. My family had a Centris 610 and a MacUser magazine subscription. I was so eager to get that HiTech dark mode that I installed Kaleidoscope and Dad was Not Happy.
Apart from the nostalgia of being a kid with a computer customized to the point of dysfunction, there is a sense in which Mojave is a realization of Copland's visual ambition, offering an alternative hi tech theme that takes a step away from the original desktop and paper metaphor.
Am I the only one who would prefer to just use f.lux's "Darkroom" mode (red on black, basically) for coding at night / in the dark? Doesn't kill my night vision. Of course you have to switch all of your apps out of "Dark Mode" or you'll just be starting at giant blobs of red.
[+] [-] Amorymeltzer|6 years ago|reply
This for me is the crux of dark mode and is where this post falls flat: devices are just simply a different beast. They aren't newspapers or photographs, they are lamps with a color profile hotter than the Sun, and we should treat them differently. That's especially true of mobile devices, where being used before sunrise/after sunset is typical.
It's not the same, but it reminds me of how we think and talk about color (additive versus subtractive). Finger painting as a kid you learn that mixing the three colors — Red, Yellow, and Blue — makes black, but play with a computer and you'll learn that the three colors — Red, Green, and Blue — make white. It's a different system because, simply put, it's an entirely different system.
[+] [-] asdkhadsj|6 years ago|reply
Strangely, the same can be true for plain old fashioned paper. The other day I was outside and had to look at a paper. Plain, white printed paper with black text. The bright hot sun reflected off of the paper and I couldn't see anything. A darker shaded advertisement however was easy to read.
So it's all relative. In my case I just prefer not to feel bright light blinding me, so I spend most of my time in dark mode editors/etc. My biggest complaint is that websites don't let me choose. I really wish OSs would start enforcing full dark or light modes as an accessibility feature. As I wright this, my HN screen is quite bright. I frequently flip between my dark editor and my bright Slack work screen. Those bright flips kill me.
[+] [-] steve1977|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brlewis|6 years ago|reply
> Humans evolved outside, and we are generally active during the daytime and asleep when it’s dark.
The article is probably mostly right for some people.
[+] [-] blaze33|6 years ago|reply
Well said! VLC (at least on Android) has a day-night theme that switches between dark/light modes at sunrise / sunset. I wish more applications did the same.
[+] [-] anthonypasq|6 years ago|reply
It doesnt mean "screens are an entirely different system"
[+] [-] nness|6 years ago|reply
I'm all for giving people the option. Assuming everyone is able is a crux of UI/UX design.
[+] [-] dijksterhuis|6 years ago|reply
Exactly.
Something that the article doesn’t seem to pick up on is how we read and dark modes effect on that depends on what we’re reading. (The musician example doesn’t quite do it justice).
AKAIK We see the shapes of words first, then some of the letters, then we understand the word. Hence why if y-u blank -ut s-me /etters, y-u can sti// read a sentence.
I find light on dark easier to navigate with code because the “shapes” are easier to determine.
Code is highly structured - even different variable names have different shapes.
Having said that...
Reading a full on research paper or something has to be dark on light for me. I’m reading something with less structure, where the words are one after the other.
So... yeah. It’s context and task dependent. So it’s a good thing there’s a choice.
[+] [-] vallode|6 years ago|reply
Optional settings are the beauty of software, they shouldn't be shunned but encouraged.
[+] [-] SomeHacker44|6 years ago|reply
This has been exacerbated by my recent "graduation" to progressive glasses. For whatever reason these seem to cause their own chromatic abberation issues.
Dark mode actually makes the fringing a bigger problem, but I configure everything not to use blues significantly and so it overall makes things more readable for me.
[+] [-] jaabe|6 years ago|reply
Still, I agree that having both a light and a dark mode is better than having just one of them.
[+] [-] ljm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangerbird2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zambal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wayoutthere|6 years ago|reply
Agree that colored text contrasts better on a black background too.
[+] [-] ballenf|6 years ago|reply
I still miss that way of doing development, probably more out of nostalgia than actual productivity.
[+] [-] discreteevent|6 years ago|reply
For the same reason I definitely prefer to read long form text in light mode. Which means that I would have to switch between dark and light mode anyway (even if most web content was switchable to dark mode). So it's light mode for me with at most #F5F5F5 background for code
[+] [-] YayamiOmate|6 years ago|reply
I don't trust results that say black on white put less strain on their eyesight and general congnitive stress, because I've personally consistently felt different. At best it depends on surrounding both backgrounds and light sources.
[+] [-] liquid9|6 years ago|reply
CD Drives and USB Ports beg to differ
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ballenf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] douglaswlance|6 years ago|reply
That argument makes no sense. It's like saying we evolved to walk barefoot, therefore shoes are bad for you.
Just because we evolved a certain way, doesn't mean that's the best way to do things.
My hypothesis is Dark mode is less light, and less light is better for your eyes.
But until there are scientific studies on the topic, who knows.
[+] [-] tigrezno|6 years ago|reply
If you were walking barefoot all your life, you'd have strong feet, as evolution wanted.
Low light condition is actually awful for your eyes. I can use drive without glasses in the morning, but at night I really need them, because our eyes are designed for day light conditions.
[+] [-] blissofbeing|6 years ago|reply
And by better I mean (from the article): "Light Mode provides better performance in focusing of the eye, identifying letters, transcribing letters, text comprehension, reading speed, and proofreading performance, and at least some older studies suggest that using a positive polarity display results in less visual fatigue and increased visual comfort."
[+] [-] titzer|6 years ago|reply
If you've ever had an eye injury or been visually impaired and had to use a computer screen, you'll know the author is just plain wrong here. Absolutely amazing the author cites zero studies dealing with visual impairment.
My anecdote: injured my epithilium in both eyes, almost went blind; looking at a computer screen produced unbearable pain that was only marginally tolerable in dark mode. Developed new empathy for visually impaired people.
[+] [-] S_A_P|6 years ago|reply
As for the other points, its largely subjective but I have dark mode enabled in every app that will support it. On windows, I run the experimental build so I can have more complete dark mode support, and enabled the half baked dark mode in sql server management studio. All my IDEs are set to dark mode, because eye strain is a thing and for me at least dark mode is much easier on the eyes.
[+] [-] masswerk|6 years ago|reply
Personally, I don't think there is an ideal solution to match all scenarios. There are some applications, where light on black may be superior, and others, where it's the other way round. Empirically, for content-heavy, lengthy text we had a few trends for light on black in the past (e.g. "cool web design" in the late 1990s) and reversed from this soon each time. For an example, I much prefer reading HN comments as-is as compared to a hypothetical dark mode UI.
[+] [-] shawnz|6 years ago|reply
I think the point they are making is, why would we have ever moved away from the technologically simpler option if it also happened to be a better design? What made us get rid of terminal colours in favour of black-on-white, when we could have just improved the design of the white-on-black colours?
[+] [-] Tade0|6 years ago|reply
Now that my vision has somewhat deteriorated with age and I use glasses for driving during the night, I find dark mode annoying and blurry.
My take is that it boils down to this.
[+] [-] 1e-9|6 years ago|reply
Edit: The effect is similar to a pinhole occluder used by an ophthalmologist to test your eyes without the affect of refractive errors from imperfections in your eye lenses. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinhole_occluder
[+] [-] Krasnol|6 years ago|reply
> Vision research has shown that humans prefer dark-on-light.
There are obviously quite many humans who don't. Even if it's scientifically better or god knows what.
I do that. Prefer light-on-dark. Everywhere. I want to paint it black! It's not a hip, style thing. I'm not hip or stylish. I just hate the white and as a day moves on, my hate for that becomes greater. And yes I know about the programs that make your screen brightness lower. I have it on my home PC (and I don't like the yellowish tone...but it's better than nothing I guess). I can't have it on my work PC.
[+] [-] philliphaydon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Moru|6 years ago|reply
My eyes are deteriorating with age too so this is getting more and more important. That blue light is not good for your retina. There are glasses with filter so you get the blue filtered out everywhere, might be something to look into soon I guess.
[+] [-] thetest3r|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vbuwivbiu|6 years ago|reply
It also ignores the fact that we've had light-on-dark mode for ages: blueprints and microfiche, blackboards and granite tablets
I mean, the Rosetta Stone is light-on-dark
[+] [-] _o-O-o_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilmiont|6 years ago|reply
For me personally light interfaces make my eyes hurt.
Dark themes are, for me, without questions MUCH easier on the eyes, irrespective of what this article claims or the science says.
Dark mode is a choice. You don't have to use it. I really hope the choice is preserved and extended into as many interfaces as possible.
Just because YOU don't find it easier on the eyes (article author), does not mean that is true for everyone.
If I was using a light theme in Sublime Text, or Office, or Terminal, I wouldn't be able to last very long in the workday....
[+] [-] tomxor|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masswerk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamzozo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saagarjha|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwking|6 years ago|reply
Regarding the "dramatic new look" angle, what I find hilarious about this is remembering the vaporware that was MacOS Copland. My family had a Centris 610 and a MacUser magazine subscription. I was so eager to get that HiTech dark mode that I installed Kaleidoscope and Dad was Not Happy.
Apart from the nostalgia of being a kid with a computer customized to the point of dysfunction, there is a sense in which Mojave is a realization of Copland's visual ambition, offering an alternative hi tech theme that takes a step away from the original desktop and paper metaphor.
Interesting article on Kaleidoscope that I found while googling for an example screenshot: http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/articles/learning-from-kale...
screenshot: http://pcdesktops.emuunlim.com/pictures/ss/hitech.jpg
[+] [-] siegecraft|6 years ago|reply