DARKNESS FALLS IN 2020
Some marketing insights from the golden age of advertising are still as true today as they ever were. Perhaps there is none greater than this gem: Listen to your customer. In the digital age, this stretches beyond your products, services and that finely-crafted brand tone, to also include the features and quality of life expectations that customers desire and expect.
It turns out that people don’t want to put down their devices at night. That’s a good thing for brands, as it means that Customers want to consume what you’re cooking at all times of the day. And they’d like to do so without having your bright website or application burned into their retinas. It’s as simple as that.
Enter Dark Mode.
Dark Mode isn’t brand spanking new.
While we weren’t able to pinpoint the developer or product that deserves the credit for being the first, Dark Mode has been around within smartphone applications for some time now. Until 2019, that’s largely where support remained, as an optional setting inside a handful of applications available to Apple and Android devices.
Can we confidently make the argument that these brave few developers, who made Dark Mode support available in their apps, started the slow burn of consumer demand? Or is it simply a case of form following function? We’d wager the latter, with our sincere apologies to those pioneer developers.
In the age of technology we all find ourselves enjoying, we consume crazy amounts of online content. In Hootsuite’s latest Digital Trends Report, data shows that the average person spends 6 hours and 42 minutes consuming digital media every day, with half of that happening on mobile devices. When you add that up, that’s a whopping 100 days spent online per year. I just… I can’t… I should stop typing right this minute and plan a trip to the woods.
Let’s call it like it is, with that amount of screen time every day, there’s no way our eyes can handle being fixed on some small, bright spot in a dark room without going crazy or blind. Or both. We’ve all felt it, the eye strain from spending the work day staring a screen, and then coming home and spending more time looking at screens. Dark Mode is an evolution of design required by the evolution of mankind itself.
Photo by Daniel Korpai
the thing about evolution is that it just keeps going.
While Dark Mode has in fact been around for a minute, the tail end of 2019 saw Google, Apple and Microsoft push out OS updates to support Dark Mode as a system-wide thing. This changes the game drastically for brands, web designers and developers. Where previously we had to hope an app included a Dark Mode setting, now the actual devices we use (laptops, smartphones, tablets, smartwatches) make Dark Mode a standard option. And that decision not only impacts the applications running on these devices, but also the browsers we use to surf the web every day. Chrome and Safari both have support for Dark Mode, while rumor has it that the Internet Explorer team is working on this at present (behind the times, as per freakin’ usual).
The new system-wide Dark Mode is also able to take advantage of the dynamic screen settings available on most current devices. For example, on my Macbook Pro, my Dark Mode kicks in at dusk every day. This allows me to check in on important notifications, read the news, and even control the TV, without lighting up the living room like Times Square. It’s just a better quality of life for everyone involved, and the biggest winner is my eyeballs. Not to mention that, on the whole, Dark Mode consumes less of your device’s battery. Amen.
However, this shift means that brands who don’t already have a Dark Mode have been left behind, almost overnight. When my Dark Mode kicks in, it’s becomes painfully clear which applications and content sources do not support my now native Dark Mode setting. It’s not their fault, this is all happening pretty quickly.
What should you do to support Dark Mode?
For starters, take stock of your digital platform and identify customer-facing channels and assets that are missing support for Dark Mode. Most social channels are already covered by providers, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, who all support Dark Mode today. However, now that Dark Mode is a native setting across leading operating systems, browsers support Dark Mode too and your website must deliver content while respecting the wishes (a.k.a., preferences) of your audience. You don’t want to be the standout brand who doesn’t respect their eyeball wishes! You’ll get deleted from the feed faster than you can say “Don’t go into the light, Carol Anne.”
There isn’t a simple toggle to make that happen, unfortunately. Native Dark Mode requires a specific approach to development that will require customization to your CSS stylesheets. At Interstellar in 2020, Dark mode support will be included in every digital project, and we’re working to update our Orion Theme for Shopify, BigCommerce and Wordpress+Woo, so that our current partners on these platforms can support native Dark Mode for their audience and customers.
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