Bring back the original SAPGUI

Written By - Arwel Owen | November 14th, 2023

Bring back the original SAPGUI’s dark mode, as it emits far less carbon than the blue theme widely used today. I jest, of course, yet who knew your SAPGUI or Fiori colour scheme can impact your carbon emissions.

Curious?

As Tom Greenwood states in his wonderful book Sustainable Web Design: colour can impact the amount of energy used by the user’s screen. Whilst LCD flatscreens use the same energy regardless of the colour on the screen (due to a permanent backlight), an OLED display used in most of today’s TVs, laptops and smartphones, illuminates each pixel individually.

As each OLED pixel is literally a tiny LED, black is the most efficient colour, since black pixels are switched off. In contrast, white is the most energy-intensive, with lighter colours generally using more energy and thus emitting more carbon. Using darker colours (or an application’s dark mode) therefore becomes a viable technique to reduce energy on client devices. For example, Google recently stated that running Google Maps in dark mode reduced screen power draw by 63%.

Even the smallest decisions impact our carbon emissions.