Going Dark

Textile 2024 week 14 note

Colour can count for a lot. Recently with Tableland Studio we’ve been piloting a dark mode colour scheme. This is a bigger deal than you probably think and the history of dark mode is an interesting one. We’ve been working with the idea coming from the angle of Studio being a developer tool, and especially as such, it works first in CLI, and then we bring it to the GUI. This actually matches up with the origin story of dark mode, which was is in early UI designs which were for text based terminals. Way back when, actually turning on a pixel had computing and energy costs which were comparatively significant. So it was cheaper to just turn on the ones you needed, which at the time were for text. Then as early windows-based interfaces came to the scene, the thinking was that it should remind all these people new to using computers of paper. So it all went white. That simple really. There are of course other issues in terms of glare and spending long amounts of time reading screens, where dark mode may help, but we’re thinking about the aesthetics and our origin in terminals and paying a bit of homage to that.