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Why does nobody talk about OLED phones making dark mode look different than my monitor?
I built a dark theme for my sister's bakery site last month using #121212 background and #E0E0E0 text, tested it on my Dell monitor, and it looked clean and easy to read. Then I pulled it up on my phone at night and the gray text looked almost white against the black, way harsher than I expected. I did some reading and found out OLED screens turn off pixels for true black, so dark grays shift a lot compared to LCD. Now I test every dark theme on three devices before I call it done. Does anyone here pick their gray values based on phone screens or just trust one monitor?
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the_ben14d ago
What made you land on #121212 and #E0E0E0 in the first place? I ask because that exact combo is one of the most common dark theme defaults out there, and it does tend to look way lighter on OLED than on an LCD panel. As far as I know, the gray itself doesn't actually "shift," the pixels just go fully black around it, so your eyes adjust to a much darker surround and the text reads brighter by comparison. Have you tried bumping the background up to something like #1a1a1a or #1e1e1e to cut that contrast? Curious if the phone test actually changed what you ship, or if you just tweak until all three screens stop fighting each other.
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