A dark theme for Jira Cloud - dark background, contrasting text, etc

Latest Update:

Hey all, I have disappointing news for all of you. This work has been paused in order to focus on performance improvements and other accessibility initiatives. We still believe this is still highly important work and we understand the impact this is having on some of our customers. Unfortunately we do not have an estimate on when it will resume. This is a hard update to make as it comes after the 4 year anniversary of this ticket; nonetheless, we want to ensure that all of you are informed.

This change in direction has been made centrally in our Design System which will lead to improvements across many properties, but in the meantime it affects Jira’s ability to roll out dark mode directly. That doesn’t remove the sting of this for those of us who are passionate about dark mode, but know that the decision from our leaders was made with the customer in mind. When Design System has capacity to pick this up again, myself or whoever owns the work at the time will update all of you.

Previous Updates:

Hey everyone! Jake from Atlassian’s Design System team here, and one of the leads looking over our internal dark mode effort. You may have noticed that this ticket has moved to “in progress” - that’s because we are underway to make this happen. We’re still in the design phase, but lucky for you that means that we can share some cool screenshots of what’s in store for you in the future:

We’re still working on finalizing the foundations of design for dark mode internally, and even once that’s done there’s still a ton to do. Two of the important things we want to ensure when we release dark mode are that we aren’t doing it in a way that will hurt performance, and we are doing it in a way that will encourage and promote accessibility. This will take us rewriting some old pieces of architecture and writing new ones as well. We will be building in a way to support multiple themes/appearances, not just for dark mode, but also for others in the future such as high contrast modes or native colorblind modes. It will be a significant effort to get this right for all of our products. While we won't be releasing dark mode today, we will be giving you a commitment to keep you informed of where we are on this roadmap.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this JAC ticket and posting updates for as long as the foundational pieces take to get right. Once the foundations are in place, Atlassian products such as Jira can then use them to build a dark mode theme. After that work begins we’ll have one of the product leads take over updates on this ticket. Feel free to ping me any questions. We’re here now and we’re listening.