Working with themes in Next Experience

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Working with themes in Next Experience

    Theming in Next Experience enables ServiceNow customers to customize the visual appearance of their platform to align with their company’s brand. Themes allow modification of colors, typography, imagery, and shapes while maintaining the overall ServiceNow look and feel. This capability primarily applies to the classic environment elements such as Lists, Forms, and Dashboards; however, it does not extend to custom components.

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    Key Features

    • Theme Builder: A core plugin included with Next Experience that allows users to quickly create, edit, preview, and publish themes in a safe, upgrade-friendly manner.
    • Default Themes: New Zurich release instances start with the Coral theme by default, while existing customers retain their prior applied themes like Polaris. Themes can be cloned and customized.
    • Theme Records and Styles: Themes consist of style records that define colors, fonts, shapes, and imagery. Styles have an order value that determines override precedence. Core styles are active by default, with variants available for user selection, often to support accessibility needs such as color blindness.
    • Dark Theme Support: Available for configurable workspaces, lists, forms, dashboards, and reports to reduce eye strain and improve usability in low-light conditions. Dark variants exist for Polaris and Coral themes, and dark palettes can be created via Theme Builder.
    • Theme-able Empty State Images: Customizable visuals to enhance user guidance and actions when content is missing.
    • Login Theming: Administrators can customize login page illustrations, background colors, and remove gradients to better align the login experience with corporate branding.

    Practical Benefits

    • Deliver a consistent branded experience across your ServiceNow instance’s classic UI elements.
    • Efficiently manage visual updates with Theme Builder, ensuring upgrade safety and ease of maintenance.
    • Enhance accessibility by providing theme variants suited for different user needs, including dark mode options.
    • Improve the user experience by customizing empty states and login pages to reflect your company’s identity.
    • Maintain control over theme application priority through order and applicability settings in style records.

    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.

    Next Experience default themes

    New customers launching on Zurich will have the Next Experience Coral theme enabled by default on their instance.

    Existing customers upgrading from a previous release will continue to see the theme they've applied to their instance prior to upgrade, for example the Next Experience Polaris theme or a theme created in Theme Builder. Use Theme Builder to publish Coral theme to your instance or add Coral theme to the Next Experience UX Parent App Theme table.
    Figure 1. Next Experience default themes
    Theme preference with Polaris and Coral themes displayed.

    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 or Coral theme or by cloning a Theme Builder theme record. If you clone either the Polaris or Coral 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 or Coral theme or create a dark alternate color palette in Theme Builder.
    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 from their Theme user preference, 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 and Coral themes include a Dark Theme variant that is available on instances with Next Experience enabled.