About Dark Page Design

About web page design with dark backgrounds.

First of all, recently I have found a good post about this on the web. This was before I made this website and I read it carefully.

I like to idea of designing user interfaces and web pages. For a couple of years, my design adventure (not pro though, in the corner of my workspace) has been going on the same circle of monologues:


“I have to build light designs. A white background always looks professional.”
“This has become so boring. After all, black backgrounds are stylish.”
“Ohw, this page is too gloomy now. Plus people will think about me a childish web lamer. Let’s make this white”.
“This is too bright! In anyway, aren’t we coders do code on black IDEs? No eye strain is important. Return to black.”
“This has become a Rock music blog, or a game console. This is unprofessional.”
“No, no I don’t want white, Spotify is cool. I will make it black again…”

At the end of all these, I have some ideas about it. To speak more analytically, I have to admit that dark backgrounds have some disadvantages:

1. It is too easy to come up with gloomy, cheerless, pages that makes not the eye but the mood tired. To make it not this happen, is hard.
2. There is always a risk of being unprofessional. Sometimes it looks like you are on a year-2005 lamer hacker forum.
3. If I should talk about myself, when I write my hobbies somewhere (as this personal website), I always write that I like to listen to heavy metal music. When you do that, for people, suddenly it makes sense that why you picked up these cursed colors. As an explanation, no I didn’t do it because of it; even space/universe curiosity is more related with that.
4. In the same way, dark is more suitable for a specific field than other companies of fields (or an individual person). To give an example from game industry, the official page of Playdead Games has an utterly dark design and they are right to do that. But why you? Why a normal software engineer for instance.
5. Plus we have to consider fashion of course. In spite of dark design usage ratio is increasing, still the number-one preference among institutional/official websites is light design.

However, time is changing, dark designs are rising. By the way I am not talking about new theme option of Instagram, or Spotify itself. Because these cannot be counted as websites completely, these are applications. An application user interface is easier to be dark. Moreover I think they all should be. This is a topic of another article.

I can say that, as long as some conditions are met, dark theme can be quite used. I am not the authority or a graphic designer of course, but I see it is working when I do these.

1. Never use solid black #000000 as the whole pages background. Soft shades of black and very dark grays are always better. I use #1a1a1a as a base, sometimes I lighten it a bit.
2. Soft black and boring dark gray are too close to each other. In order to avoid that, some main color contribution may be used. For instance, if you are reading this article on my website instead of Medium, background is #1a1a1e (1e means 3 times more than 1a, which are red and green). I think with a so little help of blue, concrete gray tone can be broken. (31.10.2020 edit: it is #191c1f now) (06.08.2021 edit: It is with a little bit greenish touch now :D)
3. Extra blocks are good. Documentation of Jekyll is a good example. They use extra containers just wrap the texts.
4. To start with an image at the top of the page, brings a stylish and mysterious sound. White can handle simple (text-only) pages, but it is risky when it is black.

May be because of the humanity starts to share data with white or other light-colored papers, we wanted to share it on the Internet in the same way. But now we share data on digital screens. In my opinion, it is enough to be traditional, and it is time to be stylish.