Working with themes in Next Experience

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated August 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Working with themes in Next Experience

    Theming in Next Experience allows ServiceNow customers to customize the visual appearance of their platform to better reflect their company brand. It enables changes to colors, typography, imagery, shapes, and forms while maintaining the overall ServiceNow look and feel. Theming is primarily applied to the classic environment, including Lists, Forms, and Dashboards, though custom components do not support theming.

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    Key Features

    • Theme Builder: A tool to quickly create, edit, preview, and publish themes for your ServiceNow experiences. It requires downloading from the ServiceNow Store and may need a cache refresh to appear.
    • Theme Records and Styles: Themes are created by cloning the default Polaris theme or building new ones via Theme Builder. Styles define reusable visual elements such as color palettes, typography, and imagery. Each theme must have at least one Core style.
    • Order and Applicability: Styles have order values determining which styles override others. Higher-order styles override lower ones if applicability conditions are met.
    • Variants: Alternate versions of a theme, often used for accessibility (e.g., color blindness) or to provide dark mode options. Users can select variants via preferences. Dark theme variants are not auto-generated but can be created manually.
    • Dark Theme Support: Supported for configurable workspaces, lists, forms, dashboards, and reports. It reduces blue light for easier viewing in low-light environments.
    • Empty State Images: Allows adding customizable images to empty states, improving user guidance and engagement.
    • Login Theming: Customize login illustrations and welcome text to align the login experience with your branding.

    Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers

    By using themes in Next Experience, you can ensure a consistent and branded user interface across your ServiceNow instance. Theme Builder simplifies managing themes in an upgrade-safe way, allowing your admins to control colors, fonts, and imagery efficiently. Variants enable you to offer accessible or dark mode options, enhancing user comfort and inclusivity. Additionally, customizing empty states and login pages improves user interaction and reinforces your brand identity.

    Themes enable you to tailor the visual experience for your users, helping to update the look and feel to be more like your brand.

    Quickly create, edit, preview, and publish themes to your experiences using Theme Builder. See Configure Next Experience with Theme Builder for more information.

    Important:
    Theming applies to the classic environment in Lists, Forms, and Dashboards. Custom components don't reflect theming.

    Theming at a glance

    • Theming is the ability to customize the Next Experience Design System to reflect your product or brand.
    • Theming means styling various aspects of the ServiceNow® platform while maintaining the overall look and feel.
    • Theming typically involves changing the colors to your company brand colors but can also include typography, imagery, shape and form.

    Theme record

    This image shows the default Polaris theme, which is read-only. You create your own themes and styles to be used by experiences in your instance by either cloning the Polaris theme or using Theme Builder. If you clone the Polaris theme, you also must clone the styles under UX Theme Styles and make changes to those styles, as desired. At least one Core type style must be defined.

    Next Experience Polaris UX theme main record with Applicability, Order, Style and Type columns highlighted

    Theme styles

    You can configure a theme to match your company brand look and feel in ServiceNow. When you configure a theme, you adjust the color schemes, fonts, and images of your applications. On the Theme Builder Theme form, you configure Order, Style, and Type settings.
    Order
    Style records with higher-order values override styles with lower values. The base system styles all have the order 0. If you meet the Applicability constraint, styles with higher values override the base system styles. If not, the lower-value style is used.
    Style
    Style records define reusable styles that together comprise a theme. Core styles include color, shape and form, typography, and imagery. Variants are a different version of the theme, commonly different colors, that users can select in preferences. The most common use of variants is for accessibility purposes, particularly to account for color blindness. If you decide to use a dark theme, consider selecting the Polaris theme or create a dark alternate color palette in Theme Builder. For more information, see Add an alternate color palette.
    Type
    Styles can be of either the Core type or the Variant type. Core styles are active by default. Users can choose from available variants for themselves from the User Preferences, and those variant styles override the core style. Theme Builder doesn’t automatically generate dark theme variants; however, you can create a dark alternate color palette with limited customization. For more information, see Add an alternate color palette. The Polaris theme includes a Dark Theme variant that is available on instances with Next Experience enabled.

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