Help us test Jira’s new dark theme

[#1]

Help us test Jira’s new dark theme

Hello Community

Just dropping in because we have some huge news to share… we’re delivering an early access preview of our highest requested feature, a dark theme (and a new light theme as well) to Jira Cloud products.

Change the appearance of your Jira Cloud products!

We’ll be providing early access to themes in Jira labs, which means you get to test it out early and help us make the feature the best it can be. Once you’ve opted in to the experience, you’ll be able to switch between our new light and dark themes. We really need to call out that this is still a work in progress and you can opt out at any time.

We want it to be the best experience possible for the Atlassian community, and who better to help us do that than all of you?

Dark

If you’re a bit of a night owl or you’re in dark mode on your other work tools and you want consistency, then Jira is ready to join you on the dark side. Some other awesome dark theme benefits include:

• reducing eye fatigue

• improved accessibility for people who are sensitive to light

• lower energy consumption of some devices

• it looks really cool

Light

If working in light mode is more your style, use our new light theme. You might notice a few changes to our light theme as we’re updating the contrast across our colors to help with accessibility and usability.

How to opt in to the new themes

The feature is available via Jira Labs on your Personal settings page. If you’d like to try it out:

1. Go to Settings > Personal Jira settings.

2. Scroll down the page to Jira labs.

3. Opt in to Light and dark themes using the toggle.

At any point, you can return to the original Jira colors by opting out of Light and dark themes, just switch the toggle back off.

If you’re an admin with more than 10 users on your site and you don’t want this feature available in your instance, please contact our support team.

What to expect

The majority of our products are looking pretty sweet in the new themes, but there are a few bits and bobs that are definitely a work in progress. It won’t affect all our users, but depending on your setup, those areas might look a little odd during the early access period.

If you find parts of Jira that don’t look quite right with the new themes, please give us feedback through the Share your feedback button on your Personal settings page.

1. The Share your feedback button located on your Personal settings page.

Customized main horizontal navigation bars

If you’re working in your project and notice the top navigation bar is a custom color that isn’t compatible with the new dark theme, your admin may have changed the site colors. You’ll need to contact your admin to revert the colors, then they’ll work with the new themes.

To revert the colors of a Jira site and make it compatible with the new themes, an admin will need to:

1. Go to Settings > System.

2. Under USER INTERFACE, select Look and feel.

3. Under the Navigation colors section, and next Background select Revert

Here are a few things we’re still working on

All these things will continue to work normally, they just might look odd while we make them compatible with the new themes. If you’re experiencing any of these bugs and you feel like they are too distracting or disruptive, you can opt out of Light and dark themes using the toggle on your Personal settings page and return to the original Jira colors.

1. The Editor experience
   The Editor experience affects all of our products, specifically when viewing and creating issues and Pro-Forma for Jira Service Management. The areas that we are working on are:

   • Viewing and editing panels

   • Editing Tables
     
     

2. Marketplace apps
   Marketplace apps don’t display in the new dark theme yet (as you can see in the image below). We’re working with Marketplace Partners right now and supporting them with tools to update their apps over coming months. You should expect to see the first apps in dark theme around the beta period — no need to bug your favourite app developer yet!
   Are you a Marketplace Partner? Check out all the info here 

Embedded Confluence experience
If you're embedding Confluence pages in any Jira products, they might look a bit like a Zebra. We’ll fix it though, we promise! This bug primarily affects knowledge based articles in Jira Service Management.

Illustrations and images

We have over 1000 images in Jira Cloud products! Unfortunately, none of them have custom dark theme versions. Illustrations and images in your Jira products might look a little odd (particularly in the new dark theme) while we work to identify all the custom images and create darker versions of each one.

The workflow editor

We're still working on making the workflow editor compatible with the new themes.

Data visualisations and charts

Visualising data and viewing charts, you'll encounter scenarios that need some improvements to the contrast and legibility.

Watch this space

Before I sign off, I’d love to give a shout-out to the many teams across Atlassian that helped bring this much-anticipated feature to life. We’re all so excited to see it out in the wild!

We’ll keep you posted on any updates so like and follow this post to follow the journey.

If you have any immediate thoughts or questions, you can share it in the comment thread below

Thanks for reading,

Amira Badran

Product Manager, Jira Software 

[Guang Yang]

Fantastic new theme! Thanks for the effort Jira team!

[David Meredith]

We've been using 3rd party CSS hacks and styles to have this for ages but I'm really happy that Atlassian have started to push this out natively even while there are some inconsistencies with parts of the system.

The blindingly white screens are difficult to deal with, especially if users have had to log on at night for whatever reason. 

[Yatish Madhav]

Superb! Thanks @Amira Badran , Atlassian and team ... I am about to toggle it on for myself and share this with the team and hopefully later with our organization. Apprecaite the effort and look forward to general availabilty and additional tweaks ... esp with add ons. Thank you

[Tayim, Dina (D.)]

Not sure where the best place is to leave feedback. Love the dark theme but certain things do not show up well. I am playing around with Dashboards right now and two of the widgets I added use colors that are hard to see against the dark background ( Sprint Health Gadget and the Filter Results Gadget when Label was added as a column). 

[David_Horn]

Thank you for the new feature!

[Aniket Kriplani]

The dark theme looks great! Super sleek! Thanks!

[Amanda Barber]

Just shared with my team - I know a few people who will be thrilled by this addition!

[Sean M]

Are there plans to bring this to Data Center? 🤞🏼

[John Funk]

A very welcomed feature!

[Collista Lewingdon]

So excited for this feature!!! Sharing out to our users in our monthly Atlassian Newsletter. 

[Amira Badran]

Thanks everyone for testing out the new dark theme and providing feedback. Your input helps us improve the user experience and make the product even better. We appreciate your help and support.

For those of you who have reported issues with the top navigation bar being a custom color that isn’t compatible with the new dark theme, your admin may have changed the site colors. You’ll need to contact your admin to revert the colors, then they’ll work with the new themes.

To revert the colors of a Jira site and make it compatible with the new themes, an admin will need to:

1. Go to Settings > System.

2. Under USER INTERFACE, select Look and feel.

3. Under the Navigation colors section, and next Background select Revert

If you still have any comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to share them with us. Thank you for your participation and for taking the time to provide feedback.

[Bogdan Butnaru _Qotilabs_]

@Amira Badran This sounds like basically any color customization is not compatible with themes at all. I think you should update the Look and feel page to allow administrators to configure separate customizations for dark and light mode, otherwise most of that page becomes useless.

[Amira Badran]

@Bogdan Butnaru _Qotilabs_ Thank you for your feedback regarding the look and feel page. Our team is currently evaluating the usage of this page and how it can better work with the newly introduced colour themes and will plan any necessary improvements accordingly. If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

[Amira Badran]

@Sean M Thanks for your interest in the dark theme. We appreciate your feedback and understand that this is a top ask across all products and in Data Centre. We are committed to improving the accessibility of our products and have been working on a number of improvements in this area. However, at this time, the Data Centre team does not have a dark theme on the roadmap.
Thank you again for your interest and for taking the time to share your feedback with us.

[Sharon Page]

Super excited to see this is being implemented and tested!

Looks promising so far.

Is there a view to roll this out to the Atlassian Administration pages as well? And when can we expect a similar feature for Confluence? :)

[Tercio Silva]

The panels are kinda weird in dark mode...

 

[Collista Lewingdon]

 

I second Tercio's comment. And drop down menus are so light you cannot even SEE them on a regular screen. And yes, I did submit the feedback through the link as instructed when you opt in to dark mode. 

[Amira Badran]

Hi @Tercio Silva and @Collista Lewingdon, Thank you for taking the time to test out our new Dark Theme. Please be assured that we are aware of this issue and are working diligently to resolve it as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you have any further questions or problems, please do not hesitate to reach out to us.

[Janusch Rentenatus]

 Very nice. But how I can set dark to Confluence? Bad now so patchy. 

[luca palminteri]

finally, although I've made an extension for this (all free). The code is public if someone wants to use it or improve it.

repo: https://github.com/LucaPalminteri/dark-theme-jira

extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-theme-for-jira/ckedjfpbcmnjleckmfjogkchahffaomg

I'd love to have some feedback. Enjoy it.

[Zach Norris]

I've been enjoying the light/dark themes. Thank you for the effort that's been put into it. Any chance I could convince someone to implement https://drafts.csswg.org/mediaqueries-5/#prefers-color-scheme so I don't have to choose just one? It's really handy going between devices, or when I have my macbook set to change based on time of day.

Cheers.

[Matthew Ropp]

Yay!  Finally!  :-)

Hopefully Confluence will follow close behind.

[Amira Badran]

@Zach Norris Thanks for sharing your feedback with us, and great to hear you are enjoying the new colour themes! Regarding the automatic theme switching based on time, we are happy to inform you that this is a highly requested feature. It is on our roadmap and being actively considered for development. We will make sure to keep the community updated on the status of this feature. 

Thanks again :) 

[Summer.Hogan]

Thanks for the information @Amira Badran ! I'm using the new dark theme and I love it! I have reported a few issues already that I am seeing, but overall it is wonderful; especially to the eyes! 

[Raimon Colmenares]

Yes! That's something we needed! Good to have a rest for the eyes!