Dark mode comes to Communities: Here’s how you can access it

Time to improve your browsing experience with the new Dark Mode feature in Communities. If you're a Pensil user, you're probably spending a decent amount of time looking at screens. And if that's the case, the constant bright light of your computer or phone screen might start bothering you.

Some want it because they work at night, or in low-light. Some need it for accessibility purposes: visual impairments, migraines or other visual disorders. Some people want it just because they want it. That’s fair too! Whyever you want dark mode, if you want dark mode on Pensil, you now, finally, we are happy to say, have it.

To save time and hopefully answer some questions, we’ve broken things down into a few handy sections.

The What

Dark mode is now available on the app across all platforms.

Dark mode is available
Dark mode on mobile community

The Where

On Pensil. It would be odd for us to announce this otherwise. Specifically, today sees the release of dark mode across all desktop apps, Mac, Windows.

Dark mode on mobile is available already (in your settings menu). We don’t want to assume that just because you want dark mode on desktop, you’ll also want it on your phone … but you’re now free to set it on both. You can enlighten yourself more on the details of that in our Help Center.

The How

Head to Themes within your Preferences to toggle between light and dark. To get there, click on your name in the left sidebar > Settings > Themes. You’ll get a preview of how everything will look—including our default set of sidebar themes, which will remain familiar but shift in palette to work better with dark mode.

These will persist in whatever workspace you set them to across mobile and desktop, so whenever you switch to the dark side, your sidebar won’t leap out and surprise you.

Change o dark mode in communities

The When

It’s available right now, and from this moment, you can toggle between light and dark mode at will, all day long, should you so wish.

The Why (or rather, the why now?)

We’ve seen our community builders create amazing visual themes with custom code. We wanted to make it easier for them to express their creativity with a variety of native theme selections, and without the need to dig into custom code.

Finally, we want to acknowledge that this is something that many have not only wanted but needed. Thank you for your patience, and your persistence.

The story of how we got here, and why now, is a long one, involving re-architecting the client, building design systems and a dash of derring-do. We needed to build dark mode in a way that would work perfectly in every part of Pensil but would also work in perpetuity.

Before and after

With these constraints, we got to work. Flash-forward a few months — and we’re excited to share a preview of our visual refresh

before and after look in community

With color themes, you can now easily change the look-and-feel of your community to suit your brand.

Are you excited?!

We couldn’t be more thrilled about what’s ahead. So much of what we’re announcing today comes from the feedback we’ve received from you.

Questions, issues or bugs? Contact us on our community, as ever, and we’ll be happy to help.

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