Hi folks,
As you may have heard at Team ‘23, or read the update on our Jira Community article, light and dark themes in Jira are now officially in beta for all customers!
This means the theme switcher has moved out of Jira labs and into the main section of personal settings, and we’re firing up the hype machine. Tell everyone you know to try it out and provide feedback! We will be listening and making further tweaks.
Thanks to all of you who joined the early access program to try out design tokens and theming, and provide feedback — we couldn’t have got here without you. I want to especially acknowledge a few early adopter partners who collaborated with us, and worked hard to have apps ready so quickly for our mutual customers:
JXL for Jira by Fine Software — a special thank you for all of your valuable feedback right from the start as a pilot program partner, helping us improve the API, and building experiences that are a great showcase of what can be achieved by embracing design tokens. In Fine Software’s words:
We adopted the new design tokens and implemented themes in JXL for Jira together with a big enhancement of the conditional formatting feature in our issue tables. It now has a 90-shades colour spectrum that instantly adjusts to the theme. As always, we poured a lot of design love and attention to detail into it and it turned out just perfect. Check it out yourself.
Appfire — with multiple apps on the Marketplace, Appfire made time to showcase their progress with our team and share feedback on early iterations of the tooling. As Appfire writes:
Appfire maintains its own design system, so part of the process of implementing this feature across our product ecosystem meant ensuring that global dark mode in Atlassian works seamlessly with Appfire’s own implementation of dark mode. We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve rolled out dark mode in Issue Matrix for Jira as part of the pilot program (with JSU not far behind), and we’re looking forward to enabling this feature on more apps, so our customers can fully customize their Atlassian sites.
Tempo — rallying a team to migrate key experiences for many Jira users, in one of the most requested Marketplace apps. Straight from Tempo:
Exciting news for those using Timesheets by Tempo within Jira! Tempo now supports dark mode when planning or logging time in the issue view. This new enhancement provides a more seamless experience for Tempo and Jira users — in addition to helping reduce eye strain and providing more comfort when working in low-light conditions.
Looking ahead, we’ll continue to listening to feedback and iterate as we head towards general availability.
Getting started now to migrate your apps? Awesome, great to have you onboard! Check out the instructions in one page for Connect apps and read all about design tokens on atlassian.design. Got questions? Ask right here!
We are currently working on subtle tweaks to dark theme to improve contrast and readability based on feedback. Expect to see changes including lighter surfaces to be rolled out in the next few weeks (during the beta). The power of design tokens means if you’re using tokens, there will be no code change required for Marketplace apps, though we encourage everyone to test and share feedback. If you are using a custom dark theme in your app, we recommend inspecting and making any similar tweaks as needed.
For developers of Marketplace apps built with Forge, we will be enabling those apps to be themed for all Jira customers the next two weeks, after Team '23 concludes. As with the Connect roll-out, you will be in control via an opt-in in your app — customers who have themes turned on in Jira settings will see your app in light/dark theme as soon as your app is updated with the opt-in.
You may have also heard that Trello has joined the party! Light and dark themes are coming to Trello, powered by the same design tokens from the Atlassian Design System. Are you also a Trello Power-Up developer? Check out Join the color theme early access program for Power-Up developers!
Lastly, among the many announcements at Team '23, dark theme will be coming to Data Centre products too. We will have more to share in the coming months about how to best develop and support themes in apps available for both Cloud and Data Centre products.
Cheers,
Stephen
Engineering Manager, Atlassian Design System