Working with themes in Next Experience

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Working with themes in Next Experience

    Theming in the Next Experience allows ServiceNow customers to customize the visual appearance of their platform to align with their company’s brand. This includes modifying colors, typography, imagery, shapes, and forms while maintaining the platform’s overall design consistency. Themes are managed and applied primarily in the classic environment on Lists, Forms, and Dashboards, though custom components do not currently reflect these theme customizations.

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    Key Features

    • Theme Builder: A core plugin included with the Yokohama release that enables creating, editing, previewing, and publishing themes efficiently and in an upgrade-safe manner.
    • Theme Records and Styles: Customers can clone the default Polaris theme or existing Theme Builder themes to create their own. Themes consist of styles that include core types (color, shape, typography, imagery) and variant types (alternative versions such as dark themes or accessibility-focused palettes).
    • Order and Applicability: Styles have an order value determining which override others, ensuring proper layering of custom styles over base system styles.
    • Dark Theme Support: Dark themes reduce blue light exposure and are supported across configurable workspaces, lists, forms, dashboards, and reports. The Polaris theme includes a preconfigured dark variant, and custom dark palettes can be created using Theme Builder.
    • Theme-able Empty State Images: Customize empty state visuals to provide guidance or actions for users, enhancing the user experience.
    • Login Theming: Customize login illustrations and welcome text to reflect company branding in the login experience.
    • User Preferences: End users can select available variant themes (such as dark mode) from their preferences, which override core styles.

    Practical Benefits

    • Deliver a consistent brand-aligned user interface across key platform areas without compromising upgradeability.
    • Improve accessibility and usability by offering variants like dark themes and color-blind-friendly palettes.
    • Enhance user engagement and satisfaction with customized empty states and login screens that reinforce brand identity.
    • Manage and deploy theme changes easily at the instance level through a centralized Theme Builder interface.

    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 by cloning a Theme Builder theme record. 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.