While I’m talking about Lea Verou, she responded to a debate about user-selectable themes on websites. I don’t remember how this debate started, but my friend Declan had a genuinely innovative way to handle it. Despite that, I just couldn’t see a reason to make the light/dark theme a user-selectable toggle at all.
I tucked this thought away and decided to blog about it at some point, and then Lea beat me to it. I agree with her take. I don’t think your web interface should have a theme selector.
First, stats that were passed around on social media last month indicate most people don’t use these settings (we’re talking less than 1%. I find this number hard to believe, but let’s pretend it’s accurate for the sake of this conversation). Second, if they have made a choice on this, they’re likely to have made it at the operating system level, and web developers have access to this choice via media queries should they need them.
So the user already picked if they want light or dark. What makes us think our sites are so special that the reader might want to change their minds just in our case?
On top of that, design is making choices. It’s great if your site can support light and dark mode. If it doesn’t, that is also a choice. But asking the end user to choose between them defers responsibility from you as the designer, and places it on the end user.
If you make something, even if that thing is a personal site, you are the arbiter of taste for that thing. Don’t defer your best judgement to others.