I ran the dark mode stream for Figma. Previously ran Atlassian’s dark mode stream. Did dark mode on a side project. Have talks online about dark mode. Dark mode is my jam.
Dark mode for collaborative canvases is incredibly hard. On the surface it seems like all content on a collaborative canvas is informational (I.e. text or diagram lines). In dark mode you can transform the bg to black and informational foreground content to white. The problem is that there’s no clarity to what lines are informational and which are artistic. You should invert a line that’s an arrow from one sticky to another, but you shouldn’t invert a line that’s the eyes and mouth on a smiley face on a yellow circle bg.
There’s also a ton of situations where there’s actually no correct way to transition from light to dark. If you notice none of the big collaborative canvases have dark mode, primarily for this reason. Happy to post examples of these impossible scenarios if people are curious.
In my eyes there’s only really two ways to do dark mode for collaborative canvases - either you choose what mode you’re in when you create the canvas (and it stays in that mode for everyone) or you use a GAN to do style transfer between the two. It’s very tricky to get it right.
Dark mode for collaborative canvases is incredibly hard. On the surface it seems like all content on a collaborative canvas is informational (I.e. text or diagram lines). In dark mode you can transform the bg to black and informational foreground content to white. The problem is that there’s no clarity to what lines are informational and which are artistic. You should invert a line that’s an arrow from one sticky to another, but you shouldn’t invert a line that’s the eyes and mouth on a smiley face on a yellow circle bg.
There’s also a ton of situations where there’s actually no correct way to transition from light to dark. If you notice none of the big collaborative canvases have dark mode, primarily for this reason. Happy to post examples of these impossible scenarios if people are curious.
In my eyes there’s only really two ways to do dark mode for collaborative canvases - either you choose what mode you’re in when you create the canvas (and it stays in that mode for everyone) or you use a GAN to do style transfer between the two. It’s very tricky to get it right.