A Brief Rant About Color

I have a lot of opinions on colors and color schemes. For example, if you are implementing a dark mode on your app / site / utility and decide to go with white text on a black background (or close-to-white on close-to-black), you should be charged with a criminal offense.

High contrast is a good thing! Don’t get me wrong! But that type of dark mode is offensive to my eyes and if I find myself using something with that color scheme I will switch to light mode, if possible, or simply leave and never come back. It’s physically painful for me, leaving haloes in my vision and causing pretty harsh discomfort if I try to read for more than a few seconds. And though this may be contentious, I find it a mark of laziness: you’re telling me you couldn’t be bothered to put in even a little effort in finding a better way to do dark mode?

So it may come as no surprise that I am a long-time Solarized user. From my IDEs, to my Scrivener theme, to my Firefox theme, to anything I can theme — if it’s got a Solarized option, I’m using it. For a long time, even this blog used some Solarized colors. (Dracula is a close second in popularity for me.)

Helion: A VS Code Theme

I’ve long experimented with my own color schemes. It’s a perfect channel for procrastination, and a procrastinator’s work is never done. Today, I think I’ve settled on a good custom dark theme which I want to release, on which I’d like to iterate as I continue to use and tweak.

Helion, inspired by Solarized and colors that faded away, is my contribution to the dark theme world. It’s not perfect — few things are — but my hope is that it becomes a worthy entry to this world.

Right now it is only a Visual Studio Code theme. As I continue to use and tweak it, I plan to standardize the template into something I can export and use for other tools.

Here is a screenshot:

Just comparing some json files

Now, I am not a usability expert. The colors here are in no way based on any scientific study and I do not assert that they are empirically perfect or better than any other dark mode theme. This is simply a theme which I’ve customized for my own tastes, according to colors and contrasts that are appealing to my own eyes

That said, any feedback is greatly appreciated. If anyone ever does choose to use the theme, I would be delighted to hear from you, whether it’s good or bad (or anywhere in between).

Enjoy!