Dark Mode

Dark mode, more than a trend

In recent years, dark mode has become one of the most requested features by users in almost every application and websites. At first it was thought that it might just be a trend and nothing more, but since major companies have implemented such functionality in their own products, many have followed in their footsteps and now it is safe to say that dark mode is here to stay.

The above has led to designers having to adapt their designs to support dark mode, which often means working twice as hard. Implementing dark mode in a product would seem to be a simple task but in reality it is not so much, especially if it is a sufficiently large and complex project.

The idea for a plugin

While working on a couple of projects where I had to implement dark mode, I realized that the process of adapting a design was very time consuming and tedious. At that time I was using Sketch to design and I started looking for a plugin that would speed up the process but unfortunately I could only find a couple of options that were either too cumbersome to use or just didn't work so I decided to create my own plugin that was easy to use and that actually worked.

After developing a first prototype I tested it with the designs I was working on and since it worked very well I decided to implement some adjustments and improvements in order to publish it in the Sketch plugin directory so that other designers could use it. Over time the community started using it and I received good feedback that allowed me to fix some bugs and implement new features.

Accelerating our productivity

Once you set up the color palette you want to use in dark mode using the Sketch Dark Mode plugin, you can start generating from individual artboards to entire documents in a matter of seconds, as you can see in the GIF above. I have used the plugin in different projects and it has helped me a lot, it's great to see how the whole tedious process can be automated in this way.

It just works.