Illuminating dark mode

Illuminating dark mode

摘要

Over the last couple of years, one feature emerged as our top user request: dark mode. Designers were tired of being assailed with a bright screen when working on Figma files late into the night, and studies have shown that people with visual impairments find dark mode more legible than light mode. (Visual contrasts are a core tenet of the W3C Accessibility Guidelines [WCAG] 3.0 standards, and we wanted to make sure our dark mode efforts satisfied those requirements.) That meant that delivering dark mode for us was more than just answering a user request—it mapped back to Figma’s core mission of making design accessible to all.

So, after months of toiling over the right approach, we shipped dark mode in May. Product Manager Jacob Miller and Product Designer Ryhan Hassan detailed the product and design challenges of implementing dark mode at Config 2022, our annual conference. Not only did dark mode surface thorny UI questions—which Jacob and Ryhan talked all about—it required a significant engineering lift. As they said in their talk, “One of the hardest things about dark mode is that people think it’s easy.”