Source: Medium.design - Medium | Read More
One of the sources of optimism for me about this AI era is the way that we‘ve run out of excuses to build the best quality products for our users.
The value of high-quality design, however you describe it—craft, usability, polish, delight, taste—is rarely disputed on its own. But against the context of finite time and people, or business priorities and pressures, we know it routinely gets left behind. It’s one of the first lessons that every designer learns on the job.
Even at a place like Medium, where we have good business and user reasons to do it, we haven’t had a pixel-perfect track record. Ten years ago, a user wrote about how we didn’t have a dark mode, and even did us the favor of getting something started, but we just never got to it.
Until now! Sorry we’re late! We know ten years is a long time, but hey, we’re able to laugh about it:
https://medium.com/media/d5b8dbeb8a5f7001136c3dec0b5fb40b/href
Check out Christine Leverett’s post on the Medium Engineering blog about how she and Sophie Aguado from the design team made it happen. Along with our official Medium Blog post, they’re fun reads on how we friend-zoned the feature off the roadmap for so long.
Let us know what else we could do to make you love long-form reading on the internet, and thank you for noticing the other stuff we’ve gotten out the door this year.
Last bit—a little bit of Median trivia—our main user feedback feed in Slack was affectionally nicknamed “the dark mode channel” and I’m quick to believe that it had a quiet yet patient hand in all of this. What should we nickname it next?
Dark Mode for Medium was originally published in Medium.design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.