Working with themes in Next Experience

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

    Themes in Next Experience allow you to customize the visual elements of your ServiceNow instance to align with your brand. Using Theme Builder, you can quickly create, edit, preview, and apply themes, enhancing user experience across the platform.

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    Key Features

    • Theme Customization: Clone the Polaris theme or create new themes to change colors, fonts, and images.
    • Order of Styles: Configure styles with order values where higher values override lower ones, allowing for flexible theming.
    • Core and Variant Styles: Core styles are default, while variant styles offer alternate designs, useful for accessibility needs.
    • Dark Theme Support: Dark themes are available and can be selected for a better user experience.
    • Customizable Login Experience: Edit login illustrations and welcome messages to reflect your branding.
    • Theme-able Empty State Images: Enhance empty states with guidance or actions for users.

    Key Outcomes

    By effectively using themes, you can ensure that the user interface of your ServiceNow instance not only meets branding requirements but also improves user interaction and accessibility. This leads to a cohesive and personalized experience for all users.

    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 apply 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.

    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 need to clone the styles under UX Theme Styles and make changes to those, 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.
    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 does not automatically generate dark theme variants; however, the Polaris theme includes a Dark Theme variant that is available on instances with Next Experience enabled.

    Request apps on the Store

    Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

    Get help with Theme Builder

    Contact your company's Customer Admin to unlock or add user accounts, perform restores or zBoots, and more.