Dark Mode Might Leave You In The Dark!

 

Moral of the story: If you're a developer, then don't use dark mode in Chrome. 

I was using Chrome Dev Tools in dark mode and couldn't even see that there's a drop-down in the styles tab color picker widget that brings up the page color palette. I don't know whether Google runs accessibility tests on Dev Tools, but the color contrast is pretty much non-existent. 

The page color palette is invaluable to validate compliance with the style guide or pick the right color for an A/B test and still be true to your branding guidelines. But you wouldn't even know it exists if you're using dark mode. Dark mode could literally leave you in the dark!

What I've concluded is that dark mode is only useful in apps that were designed to be dark-first, e.g. Discord or reddit. With light-first apps, dark mode isn't mature enough to compete with the years of UX effort that has gone into light mode. So, with light-first apps, I'm going back to light mode at least until 2022. 

These are my 2c. I would like to hear your thoughts.

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