These are all good thoughts. TBH I am not a designer by trade and I struggle to distinguish good, practical & accessible designs from just visually attractive designs.
I don’t believe the designer I’m using use those standards. I’ll try to to take a look at some of those thoughts you laid out.
I am finding though that implementing a readable but attractive dark mode design more difficult than a light one. I think the best approach for me is to first get a basic working version out with lots of custom variables and then try and figure out the best color scheme.
Could definitely use a lot more advice and more thoughts on the exact colors we’re using when it’s all rolled out.
I’m also a “developer, not quite designer”, but my previous jobs have involved some level of design and accessibility work - including adjusting color schemes.
The alpha test looks pretty good overall. I’m probly gonna use it regularly (with some tweaks via Stylebot). If it would be helpful, I’d be happy to create a GitHub gist w/ the classes & attributes that I adjust, and some suggested values, when I have the spare time.
Yeah I haven’t been working on this a lot recently, but it’d be great to improve.
With regards to accessibilty, really appreciate the links. I struggle quite a bit with navigating the tradeoff between having things look nice vs having things be accessible.
I hope this gets worked on in the relatively near future. Unfortunately the WIP dark theme still has too much unreadable text and sections that are still unexpectedly bright to be usable for me.
@brandon sry I never followed up on this . I don’t use my PC a lot these days, and it hasn’t really been on my mind. If I get to it at any point, I’ll let you know.
Edit: tho now my phone’s back in dark mode, so maybe I’ll pay it more mind
Sharing my comment from the main product thread, I think the biggest problem with the dark theme right now is low contrast, making it hard to read text in many places. Particularly where the background is also a lighter grey. I’d recommend referencing Discourse’s dark theme or if necessary asking a professional designer to help you out.
Agreed that low contrast is an issue in some areas, but I guess the specific area (your books library items) that you point out was not one I was expecting.
I see this, which i find quite contrasting… is this the same?:
I know that I prefer lower contrast so there may be some differences of opinion, but definitely want to meet a minimum bar for people.
(my image seems to be a bit better… what browser are you on?)
Edit: This blueish gray color is something I need to fix, which pops up a few places i know:
I see, interesting. As that’s the basic font color and the standard lighter background, I now understand why you find the dark mode unusable. FWIW I did have a visual designer design that, but perhaps it’s just not enough contrast.
I’ll play around with it today and see what I can come up with for a bit more contrast. Maybe i’ll have to do two templates - one high, one low contrast, but we’ll see. I do prefer lower contrast like Natively to discourse.
You also don’t like the standard AniList dark mode too, right?
. I don’t use my PC a lot these days, and it hasn’t really been on my mind. If I get to it at any point, I’ll let you know.
