Company
GitHub — The world’s leading AI-powered developer platform.
Context
Users had been expecting this and making their own themes. It was a project that needed to happen once the redesigns were done because we knew the color paradigms would shift significantly.
Highlights
Color audit and codification
Codifying an existing color system was basically a game of testing hypothesis, especially in 2020 when I didn’t know nearly as much CSS/SASS as I do know and Figma variables didn’t exist.
50 shades of dark mode
Dark mode is about dimming the lights, yes... but how much? What kind of tint? Any practical lights? Do we use this opportunity to test other color languages? Change the button colors? For a few weeks we explored the look and feel trying different levels of saturations, lightness and hues.
Communication and collaboration.
I still get a grin when I think about the level of collaboration this project took. I often talk about it as working along super heroes with such variety of superpowers. Julius came in and worked on the color palette, made it more systematic and created a system that still to this day is evolving and informing color decisions at GitHub. Javi took care of some of the hardest systems problems I’ve ever seen. We called those subsystems and they were basically dimensions of GitHub that we could not control like labels or empty state illustrations which were part of a different system. Cole, Simon and Rohan worked in perfect tandem to cover testing, implementing and QA–ing. These are only few mentions among all the cool stuff that unfolded. Best and most challenging project I’ve ever worked on.
Resolution
Universe 2020
In November 2020 we rolled out dark mode, people were excited and we soon got enough feedback to get on the next version. Today GitHub has more than 8 themes for different vision types and contrast. Below it’s the announcement video for the feature. There’s also a video of me bawling as I watch it but I will not be including that one in my professional portfolio.
