Dark mode planners and e-ink tablets: choosing the right look for your screen

The same planner can look very different depending on the screen it's on. A soft pastel theme that looks lovely on an iPad can be glaring at 11pm, and nearly invisible on a black-and-white e-ink display. This guide helps you choose a theme and format that suit your screen.

Why choose a dark planner

A dark planner has dark pages with light text and lines. People choose one for a few reasons:

• Less glare when you plan in the evening or in a dim room.
• It matches the rest of your device if you already use dark mode everywhere.
• Possible battery savings on OLED screens, which switch off pixels to show black. The effect depends on the device and how bright the rest of the page is, so treat it as a bonus rather than a reason.

Some note apps have their own dark mode, but it usually darkens the toolbars rather than the page. Apps that can invert PDF pages often shift colours in ways you didn't choose. A planner designed dark looks the way it was meant to, in every app.

Writing on dark pages

Dark pages need a slightly different toolkit:

• Use light ink: white, cream or a pale pastel for most writing. Black ink disappears.
• Test your highlighter. In many apps highlighters blend with the page, which works on white paper but can almost vanish on a dark background. A semi-transparent light pen, or a pastel shape behind the text, often works better.
• Stickers designed for white paper can look harsh on dark pages. Stickers with a dark or transparent background fit in better.

Our dark themes

You can preview every theme on our themes page, and change the accent colour in the builder.

E-ink tablets are a different kind of screen

E-ink tablets such as reMarkable, Kindle Scribe, Boox and Supernote look and feel much more like paper, and many people love them for planning because they don't do much else. But they have some limits that matter for planner design:

• Most are black and white. Colour themes turn into shades of grey, and pastel tabs can become nearly identical.
• Light greys and thin lines can disappear. High contrast matters more than on a tablet.
• Pages redraw more slowly, so a tap on a link takes a moment, and very heavy pages feel sluggish.
• Colour e-ink exists, but colours are muted compared with an LCD or OLED screen.

Dark themes are a poor fit for e-ink. A mostly black page is heavy to look at, and you'd be writing in black ink on a dark background. Use a light, high-contrast theme instead.

Our e-ink format and theme

Choose the E-ink format in the builder and the planner is sized for e-ink screens and paired with the E-ink Mono theme: pure black on white, darker lines, and white tabs with black outlines so every tab stays readable in greyscale. Cover art is switched off by default, since detailed illustrations rarely look good in grey.

Device notes

E-ink software changes often, so check your device has the latest update before importing a planner. In general:

• reMarkable: recent software versions follow internal links in PDFs. Upload the planner with the reMarkable desktop or mobile app.
• Kindle Scribe: supports links in PDFs sent to it. Send the planner with Amazon's Send to Kindle so you can write on it.
• Boox: the built-in NeoReader app supports PDF links. Boox tablets run Android, so you can also install other note apps.
• Supernote: internal PDF links usually work on recent firmware. Test with the free preview before you buy.

Our devices and apps page has a fuller compatibility table.

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