The trend
It's everywhere this week. It isn't new.
Dark-mode illusion images and “press and hold” PNGs are flooding X and YouTube again right now. Every explainer wants a patient zero — one viral post, one clever account, a date you can point at. This technique doesn't have one. It has been running since at least 2013, on a part of the internet most English write-ups never look at, and the thing people are calling new is another lap of a long cycle.
What actually happened
Five dated points, each traceable to something you can open yourself. The gap between the first two is the whole story: the trick is older than dark mode, and dark mode is what made it interesting again. The last point is this week's wave.
Japanese Twitter is already doing it
ITmedia's Nlab documents 「クリック推奨イラスト」 — “click-recommended illustration” — and describes it as a trend already in circulation: 「新たな画像の遊びが流行しています」. Artists post a transparent PNG that looks like one thing against the white timeline and another when a click opens it on black. The article reaches for 切り絵, papercutting, as the analogy: the image is a cut-out and the backing board is doing half the work.
ITmedia Nlab, 2013Dark mode turns a click trick into a theme trick
Designer and animator どまそ (@d_maso) builds a Twitter avatar drawn only in white. On the default light theme it is an empty square; in dark mode a creature appears to glow out of it. ITmedia covers it and frames the novelty precisely — transparent-PNG art had been posted for years, but this one keys off the viewer's theme rather than a click. The timing is causal rather than lucky: the effect only becomes interesting once a large share of the audience is actually on a dark theme.
ITmedia Nlab, 2019The first tool
discriminord, a small Rust command-line program, takes a light image and a dark image and emits one PNG. Its README frames the problem as a straight line — background colour is the input, alpha the slope, brightness the offset — which is the same solve Duality does, written differently.
agausmann/discriminordThe one everybody has seen
A JoJo's Bizarre Adventure piece by @MiuAkatuki passes 16,000 likes. The caption — “Click the image or use dark mode ☺” — is the tell that this is the theme-reactive version rather than the older click trick, and it is still among the highest-engagement examples of the effect anywhere.
@MiuAkatuki on XIt goes mass again — this week
Explainers for “press and hold the image” and dark-mode illusion PNGs flood YouTube and X again. The English-language wave mixes three tricks (click-to-reveal, theme-reactive alpha, four-panel slicing) under one viral name. The theme-reactive half is what Duality makes — and what a lot of people are now trying to hand-build in Photoshop after seeing it in their feed.
Press & Hold trend explainer, Jul 2026
Three different tricks keep getting called the same thing
This is the part worth getting straight, because searching for any of these terms returns all three mixed together, and only one of them is what Duality makes.
| Trick | What decides it | Uses alpha? |
|---|---|---|
| Click-to-reveal The 2013 original. Looks like one thing in the timeline, another when opened. | The app's white timeline vs its black lightbox | Yes |
| Theme-reactive this one One PNG carrying two complete images. | Your light or dark theme setting | Yes |
| Image-slicing “4-panel” A tall image cut into strips so the crop lies to you. | The post's grid layout and preview crop | No — no transparency at all |
The third one is what actually trended on X in early 2026, and it is the reason so many “how did they do that” threads describe a method that has nothing to do with transparency. If you came here after seeing a four-panel reveal, that's a different technique and this tool won't make it.
Examples you can go and look at
Live posts rather than screenshots, so you can check them against your own theme. Flip your device between light and dark while one is open — that is the whole demonstration.
- @MiuAkatukiMiu_A🍒~16.7k likes
Fanart that swaps character between themes. The caption tells you to use dark mode, which is the clearest statement of the effect you'll find in the wild.
- @llrinnellりんねおねんね~555 likes
An artist explaining her own trick, and unusually honest about its limits: if you have already changed your theme, she notes, you see it from the start.
- @karaage273Kara🦖🌹~694 likes
The best recent English-language walkthrough — a thread reconstructing the two-layer method by hand. Useful mostly as evidence of how much work this is without a tool.
- @canvaCanva~106 likes
A design platform using the trick as marketing. Low engagement, high signal: the replies are almost entirely people asking how it was done.
- @eccentric_heroぢん~406 likes
Worth reading for the caption rather than the art: “does not work in browsers or dark mode.” A hand-built two-tone PNG that breaks for exactly the audience this technique is supposed to serve.
- @d_masoどまそ
The dark-mode avatar ITmedia covered — as close to a starting point as this technique has. The account is live and the article links this exact post, but we could not read the post itself back, so treat the link as historical rather than guaranteed.
Unconfirmed — we could not read this post back when we checked, so it may no longer be available.
Engagement figures are as of 29 July 2026 and will have moved. Posts are other people's work, linked rather than reproduced.
The part the English write-ups miss
The Japanese art community has been doing this longer than anyone, has its own vocabulary for it, and is still the largest group making these images. None of that shows up in English coverage, which tends to date the trick to whenever it first crossed the writer's own timeline.
- 透過絵toukae
- “transparency art”. The umbrella term.
- クリック推奨イラストkurikku suishou irasuto
- “click-recommended illustration”. The 2013 original, click-driven.
- 透過ギミックtouka gimikku
- “transparency gimmick”. Still an active hashtag.
- タップしたら絵が変わるtap shitara e ga kawaru
- “the picture changes when you tap”. Used as a hashtag.
Further reading
- Alpha compositing — Bartosz CiechanowskiThe interactive explainer for the operator this whole technique rests on. If you only read one thing about alpha, read this.
- Alpha compositing — WikipediaThe formal statement of out = α·fg + (1 − α)·bg, and its history.
- agausmann/discriminordPrior art, and a genuinely elegant framing of the same solve as a linear equation.
- How can an image display correctly in both dark and light modes?The serious version of the question — making diagrams survive both themes rather than making a joke land.