Hey all 👋
Ever since variables have been released, I’ve been working extensively with them, especially for creating Light & Dark themes. What I really can’t wrap my head around just yet though is how to simplify my component structure even further. Ideally, I’d like to get rid of my “Dark Mode=True/False” property entirely and only have one single themed version of everything that themes itself by selecting the desired mode.
So here’s what I usually do:
- I create the component and assign all necessary variables (in Light Mode)
- The component itself and its variants will be set to mode “Auto”, so are all nested components. By doing so I can inherit the parent layer’s mode when instancing the component in my designs. This works flawlessly and already saves a ton of time.
Where it becomes tricky are all those (sub)components which cannot use variables, for example if they make use of background blurs. For all of them I still need to create Light & Dark variants, which means I still have to have my Dark Mode switch on all/most of my components, even though the rest of the component switches its theme automatically – just not the parts of the component that cannot use variables.
This complicates the process a bit, because when creating the Dark Mode designs, it’s just not enough to switch the mode on the most outer frame, but I also have to go through the layers list, select those that need variant switching and toggle them to Dark Mode too. This can be a tedious task and you can easily miss a layer.
So my question is: Do I miss something here, conceptually? I’d really like to see how you approach and solve this 😊