Why You Should Turn on the Light Mode in Your Medium App
The devil is in the details.
When reading a story on Medium, I usually first try to skim to get its overall idea. This is especially helpful when the author uses different formatting style to mark the key points.
To be more specific, Medium’s editor adopts a nice minimalist style, and the formats available are bold, italics and two quotation style. Different formatting are also provided for the title, subtitle, section title, and the subsection title.
However, I find it hard to skim a story in the Medium app on the phone. After some analysis, I figured out that it is mainly due to the dark mode setup in my phone.
I did a small showcase comparison. Here is a test story that I write, compared in the light and dark modes.
You can clearly see that
- subtitle, bold text and the gray quotation are much less obvious in the dark mode.
- Other titles, italic and the normal quotation are not impacted.
In the dark mode, there is basically only black and white color, while in the light mode, there is also gray text which add more texture to the overall format. Also, the bold text is almost unrecognizable in the dark mode, which is awful.
All you need to do is to open the setting in the Medium app, and turn on the Light mode in the Appearance option.
This is actually a common problem of dark modes. In my code editor, I do not use the light (white) color scheme because it is too dazzling for me. Since I also sometimes write Markdown document which contains text formatting, the dark (black) mode is also not a good option (similar effect to the first picture). The compromise solution I finally chose is to use a gray color scheme like this:
Thanks for reading!
My other stories about Medium:
