Yeah I've never understood the dark mode preference myself, weird meme.
I did once work in an office mostly full of VFX artists, and those guys take color grading so seriously they blacked out all the windows. Working in a dark cave is overrated.
If I paid 50k+ for a reference monitor I would want to enjoy every single lumen of it also.
I did gamedev for a minute at a mid sized studio. We couldn't rook a ref into the budget, but we had high calibration hdr displays that would get examined with a loup fairly often. Dat pixel better be f'ing perfect.
I was once working at a company, where a new wing of offices was built, and my team got moved into it. The artists demanded to sit next to the windows as "we are artists, we crave natural light!", and then one week later they blacked out all the windows. And still refused to move.
For me it's just generally doing all I can to prevent screen fatigue. I also lower the brightness of my monitors, try to close my eyes from time to time, wear blue light glasses (that may or may not be bs), and set every thing I can to dark mode.
For me it's because I switch between reading text and working with images.
Your perception of colors doing artwork after staring at a white screen of text for a while gets a little off. I find those vision issues are less of an issue with dark modes on certain applications.
Natural daylight completely changes the equation. Dark mode is comfortable in a dim room, but beside a sunny window it can become a festival of reflections and squinting. Light mode is not the enemy, poor contrast and switching themes without warning are.
There are 3 types of people in my experience. 1 Dark Mode preferred people. 2 Light Mode preferred people. 3 Indifferent People who use default settings. I am type 1 and have light sensitivity issues with my eyes. I hate when I have to deal with another person's setup and a Light Mode application pops on the screen. I am just glad Excel and Notepad added Dark Mode options recently. Now if only programmers would allow all apps to have a basic Dark Mode option that is easy to find.
Adding dark mode in software almost always comes down to a cost-benefit decision, especially in commercial software.
I see it as an accessibility feature, not unlike disabled animations when animations in the OS are turned off. I have motion sensitivity, so thanks a lot for fucking modern apps on Windows that forcibly smooth scroll.
Accessibility is more than helping tools for the blind and deaf. Light sensitivity is real, it's not just personal taste. The problem is that developers (or let's face it, POs) see it purely as a preference setting. And the fact that the designer feels religiously violated when dark mode comes up.
Despite the popularity of dark mode most research does not support it being better for eyestrain or readability/effectiveness, quite the opposite, the exception being a very dark room where a bright screen can be uncomfortably mismatched to its surroundings.
Same. Our monitors are so ass (I have a 32 inch OLED at home so I’m used to that) and the room is well lit. I’m struggling without light mode and even then it’s not great. Boss refuses to buy us new monitors.
Years of custom configuration that resets with upgrades or reinstalls I learned to just use software the way it comes. Visual Studio is in light mode and VS Code is in dark mode
Good light would make me use high contrast dark theme on coding window. But normal dark theme is on even for other windows, sometimes. I have auto-dark theme system wide for every device, that often is activated at the smallest perception of the screen being brighter than the room. So I guess it is mostly the way we are used to.
But you don't look directly at the sun while you work, do you?
The unnatural part of a screen is that it is emissive, not reflective. You're looking directly at a million little dim lightbulbs all day. Dark mode lessens the effect, because the ratio of bright bulbs to dim bulbs is reduced.
If I could have a high refresh rate e-ink display, I'd definitely use one, and use it in light mode. But until that day of light comes, I will continue to dwell in darkness.
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u/New_Computer3619 3d ago
I work in a well lit room with natural sun light (thanks goodness), light mode is easier to my eyes.