Dark Mode Toggles Should be a Browser Feature – Bram.us
This is a thoughtful proposal for a browser feature from Bram. Very convincing!
Link tags: dark
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Auto Dark Theme - Chrome Developers
At first glance, this looks like a terrible idea. But the key is in the implementation. In this case, the implementation is truly awful.
The section on detecting “auto dark theme” is, as far as I can tell, not intended as a joke.
Mind you, this could all be a galaxy-brain idea to encourage more developers to provide their own dark mode styles. (In much the same way that AMP was supposed to encourage better performance.)
Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond | The MIT Press
A new biography of Vera Rubin by Ashley Jean Yeager. One for the wishlist!
Bringing Dark Patterns to Light. Transcript of the speech I gave at the… | by Harry Brignull | Jun, 2021 | Medium
Harry gave a speech at the Federal Trade Commission’s Dark Patterns workshop in April. Here’s the transcript, posted to Ev’s blog.
When I first worked on Dark Patterns in 2010, I was quite naive. I thought that they could be eradicated by shaming the companies that used them, and by encouraging designers to use a code of ethics.
The fact that we’re here today means that approach didn’t work.
Add support for defining a theme color for both light & dark modes (prefers color scheme)
There’s a good discussion here (kicked off by Jen) about providing different theme-color values in a web app manifest to match prefers-color-scheme in media queries.
Building Dark Mode | Product Blog • Sentry
Robin makes a good point here about using dark mode thinking as a way to uncover any assumptions you might have unwittingly baked into your design:
Given its recent popularity, you might believe dark mode is a fad. But from a design perspective, dark mode is exceptionally useful. That’s because a big part of design is about building relationships between colors. And so implementing dark mode essentially forced everyone on the team to think long, hard, and consistently about our front-end design components. In short, dark mode helped our design system not only look good, but make sense.
So even if you don’t actually implement dark mode, acting as though it’s there will give you a solid base to build in.
I did something similar with the back end of Huffduffer and The Session—from day one, I built them as though the interface would be available in multiple languages. I never implemented multi-language support, but just the awareness of it saved me from baking in any shortcuts or assumptions, and enforced a good model/view/controller separation.
For most front-end codebases, the design of your color system shows you where your radioactive styles are. It shows you how things are tied together, and what depends on what.
Creative Good: Why I’m losing faith in UX
Increasingly, I think UX doesn’t live up to its original meaning of “user experience.” Instead, much of the discpline today, as it’s practiced in Big Tech firms, is better described by a new name.
UX is now “user exploitation.”
Sass Color Functions in CSS | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog
I’m not the only one swapping out Sass with CSS for colour functions:
Because of the declarative nature of CSS, you’re never going to get something as terse as what you could get in Sass. So sure, you’re typing more characters. But you know what you’re not doing? Wrangling build plugins and updating dependencies to get Sass to build. What you write gets shipped directly to the browser and works as-is, now and for eternity. It’s hard to say that about your Sass code.
Dark mode and variable fonts | CSS-Tricks
This is such a clever use of variable fonts!
We can use a lighter font weight to make the text easier to read whenever dark mode is active.
Let a website be a worry stone. — Ethan Marcotte
It was a few years before I realized that worry stones had a name, that they were borrowed from cultures other and older than mine. Heck, it’s been more than a few years since I’ve even held one. But in the last few weeks, before and after launching the redesign, I’ve kept working away at this website, much as I’d distractedly run my fingers over a smooth, flat stone.
Superhuman’s Superficial Privacy Fixes Do Not Prevent It From Spying on You » Mike Industries
Mike follows up on the changes made by email startup Superhuman after his initial post:
I will say this: if you were skeptical of Superhuman’s commitment to privacy and safety after reading the last article, you should probably be even more skeptical after these changes. The company’s efforts demonstrate a desire to tamp down liability and damage to their brand, but they do not show an understanding of the core problem: you should not build software that surreptitiously collects data on people in a way that would surprise and frighten them.
Superhuman is Spying on You » Mike Industries
A really excellent analysis by Mike of a dark pattern in the Superhuman email app.
That’s right. A running log of every single time you have opened my email, including your location when you opened it. Before we continue, ask yourself if you expect this information to be collected on you and relayed back to your parent, your child, your spouse, your co-worker, a salesperson, an ex, a random stranger, or a stalker every time you read an email.
Exactly! This violates the principle of least surprise. Also, it’s just plain wrong.
Amazingly though, Mike has been getting pushback from guys on Twitter (and it’s always guys) who don’t think this is a big deal.
Anyway, read the whole thing—it’s fair, balanced, and really well written.
Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites
1,841 instances of dark patterns on ecommerce sites, in the categories of sneaking, urgency, misdirection, social proof, scarcity, obstruction, and forced action. You can browse this overview, read the paper, or look at the raw data.
We conducted a large-scale study, analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites to characterize and quantify the prevalence of dark patterns.
Night Mode with Mix Blend Mode: Difference
Here’s a clever shortcut to creating a dark mode by using mix-blend-mode: difference.
Making single color SVG icons work in dark mode
Another good reason to use the currentColor value in SVGs.
Redesigning your product and website for dark mode — Stuff & Nonsense
Some advice from Andy on creating a dark theme for your website. It’s not just about the colours—there are typography implications too.
A web of anxiety: accessibility for people with anxiety and panic disorders [Part 1] | The Paciello Group – Your Accessibility Partner (WCAG 2.0/508 audits, VPAT, usability and accessible user experience)
Enumerating the anti-patterns that cause serious user experience issues that don’t get nearly enough attention:
- Urgency
- Unpredictability
- Powerlessness
- Sensationalism
While such intrusions can be a source of irritation or even stress for many people, they may be complete showstoppers for people with anxiety or panic disorders.
I’m looking forward to reading the follow-up post.
(I was going to say I was anxiously awaiting the follow-up post but …never mind.)
A techie’s rough guide to GDPR — Cennydd Bowles
In this excerpt from his forthcoming book, Cennydd gives an overview of what GDPR will bring to the web. This legislation is like a charter of user’s rights, and things don’t look good for the surveillance kings of online advertising:
The black box will be forced open, and people will find it’s full of snakes.
PushCrew Push Notifications for HTTP websites
A nasty service that Harry noticed in his role as chronicler of dark patterns—this exploits the way that browser permissions are presented below the line of death.