Sat down to pick dark mode colors for a dashboard and 4 hours later still had nothing

I thought I'd just swap the background to #1e1e1e and call it a day, but then every text color looked washed out or too harsh. Ended up going through 30+ shades of gray before finding one that worked with the accent blue, took way longer than the actual layout work. Anyone else get stuck in the color picking hole for way too long?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant.kevin2d ago

Yeah the low contrast trap is real. You bump the text brightness up a notch and suddenly it feels like staring into a flashlight. I spent a whole evening once just tweaking the border opacity on cards because the default 1px solid looked terrible against dark mode. The real trick nobody talks about is that dark mode exposes every tiny color decision you made in light mode. Things you never even thought about suddenly become glaring problems. It's honestly faster sometimes to just rebuild the whole palette from scratch.

max3882d agoMost Upvoted

Spent a whole evening on border opacity? That's a level of patience I don't have.