Your Dark Mode Blog Is Blinding Me
I'm a proud light mode user.
That increasingly feels like an outlier view to have. Perhaps I only have that thought because Bear Blog seems to have a lot of tech-oriented people, and tech-oriented people seem to gravitate towards dark mode.1
Whatever the reason, I've been running into a lot of dark mode blogs recently and man is it jarring when you're forced to switch from light mode reading to dark mode reading. I can feel the strain of my eyes adjusting to the theme switch each time this happens.
Often I've found myself clicking on a link that looks interesting, only to immediately back out of the page because if I want to read the full piece it means subjecting myself to long scroll of piercing white text on a dark screen.
This is not me making a case that everyone should use light mode. Far from it. Do what works for you. I'm sure the opposite is true for people who are accustomed to dark mode and then encounter a site that forces light mode onto them.
One of the nice things about Bear Blog is the default theme comes with built in light mode and dark mode CSS styling based on the user's preference. I guess some of the stock themes you can pick from are built exclusively for light or dark mode, but I always appreciate when I have the option to get the theme I prefer.
I rarely look at my own site in dark mode, but I have the option there for people who prefer it. Before writing this piece I actually went and softened up both my light and dark mode themes to try and prevent the same sort of bright, jarring visual effect I mentioned previously.
The website colorable.jxnkblk.com was a great tool to help me do that. You can plug in your background and text hex codes, then play around with the hue, saturation and lightness to settle on something that looks comfortably legible.
Look, you don't need to have a dark and a light theme. It's your blog after all. Do what you want. But if you do take the time to provide the option for both—that's pretty cool of you.
My eyes thank you.
Big assumption here on my part. Perhaps it is simply the youths and this is another piece of evidence that I am, in fact, getting older.↩