Dark Mode First
A one-page joke manifesto at darkmodefirst.com declaring dark mode a design principle.
- BPM
- 172
- GRADE
- B
- LEVEL
- 7
- RELEASES
- 0
- YEARS
- 2021–2021
Back To The Dark Ages
"in the beginning, there was dark mode." That's the first line of a one-page site I put up in April 2021. It goes on about how interfaces got bright and painful to look at, and how dark themes fell out of the mainstream even though they'd been around forever. It ends with "its time to stop staring into the lightbulb and get back to the dark ages," the DMF Design Philosophy, and a sunglasses emoji.
It's a joke, but I mean it too. The idea is that if you design the dark theme first, the light one comes out fine, and if you design light first, dark ends up as an afterthought. Static HTML, an OpenGraph share image, a favicon, no framework, no build. The title was "Dark Mode First - A design philosophy for the ages," and I haven't changed it since.
My blog had stopped in 2017, so for a while this was the newest thing on my public sites.