Why dark mode catches marketers out
You design your email on a white background, check it, and send it. But on many phones and laptops the inbox is dark, and the email app decides what to do with your colours. The same email can look fine in one app and broken in another.
Three ways email apps handle dark mode
- They use your own dark styles. Apple Mail on iPhone, iPad and Mac respects the dark mode styles in your email’s code. If you haven’t added any, it usually leaves your email as it is.
- They invert your colours. Apps like Gmail on Android and Outlook can flip light backgrounds to dark and dark text to light, whether you asked them to or not.
- They leave it alone. Some, like Gmail in a web browser, show your email unchanged inside a dark inbox.
Looksend shows each preview the way that app handles it, and labels which approach it uses.
What to look for
- Logos that disappear: dark logos on transparent backgrounds vanish against a dark background.
- Text you can’t read: grey text, or text placed over images, can lose contrast once colours flip.
- Buttons that change colour: a brand-colour button can be inverted into something off-brand.
- Images with white edges: images exported with a white background show up as bright boxes.
Quick fixes
- Give dark logos a light outline or a light shape behind them, or use transparent PNGs that work on both.
- Avoid putting important text inside images.
- Add dark mode styles to your template if your email platform allows it, for the apps that use them.
- Re-check in Looksend after each change. It takes seconds.