Customize a theme

In this article we will show how to define your own theme. Vizzlo offers a selection of 13 themes to control the following aspects of your chart's appearance:

— Color palettes

— Fonts

— Axis & grid line settings

— Brand logo

Theme editor

You can customize, manage, and create new themes while editing any chart. Click on the brush icon in the sidebar to start

Colors

Every theme comes with predefined colors. To replace an existing color, click on any of the colored squares. A color picker will open where you can either pick a color or enter a color values in form of a Hex color code or RGB value. To add a new color to your palette, click on the `+` first and then choose a color. While changing the colors, you will see instantly how the chart changes.

As an example we'll use the following colors:

— Background color - #F9F6F3

— Neutral background color - #C8AC91

— Accent color - #FF8A26

— Colors - #CD478C, #F5573C, #FE9900, #00B36C, #194B8A, #45B5C3

(We won't define `Distinct colors`, a feature we plan to depreciate in the near future.)

You can reorder colors by drag and drop. Having defined all colors, in the theme editor you should now see this:

And if you started editing the theme `Business Blue`, a bubble chart might look like this now:

Tip: If you need some inspiration to create your color scheme, there are also apps that many designers use as tools for their work: Adobe Color CC, chroma.js, Colordot, Coolors and Paletton to name a few. Also worth looking at: Wes Anderson Palettes.

Fonts

For each theme, you can mainly select a combination of up to five fonts:

1. Title font - corresponds to the font of the title of your chart
2. Heading font - corresponds to headings in charts that present text information in two hierarchical levels, i.e. which require a title for categories and their descriptions
3. Content font - corresponds to all remaining text content in the charts, e.g., labels, values, keys, and descriptions
4. & 5. (optional) Set a custom footer font and a custom axes font - by default, these inherit their properties from the content font

You can customize the fonts, their sizes, weight and color. For each font, you can select colors by clicking on the color fields. The left color field corresponds to the color fonts should apply over a light background; and the right color field, just the other way round, corresponds to the color to apply over a dark background.

All themes use Google Fonts which are free to download, if you are using our teams plan you can upload your own fonts. It is good practice to not use more than two font families: one for the title, and the other for headers and content. If you need inspiration, take a look at Font Pair, also Google Fonts has the option to show popular pairings for any of their fonts.  

In our example we chose to use only Lato Regular and set the font color to #424242, i.e. a dark gray. Left-align the title and footer, change the content font to 14pt and the result will be this

Axis & grid lines

Adjusting axis and grid line settings is straightforward. For the axis, choose to display an arrow end or not, set the line width and color. For the grid lines choose a stroke, a width and a color. We set the stroke of the grid lines to `Solid` and keep the defaults.

Add a logo

At the bottom of the theme editor you click on the button 'Add overlay'. A file browser will open and you can add an image file with the extension .gif, .jpeg, .jpg, .png, or .svg.  

You can drag and drop the image to adjust its placement on the slide. Alternatively, you can use the position coordinates to place it as you wish. By moving the slider, you can change the size of your logo.

Save as custom theme

Browse to the top of the theme editor and press `Ok` to apply your changes to your chart and click `Save as…` to save it as your own theme. Then it will be applicable to other charts without doing all those changes manually again. Press `Cancel` to discard all the changes you made.

After you saved a theme to your profile, you'll find it on top of the list while browsing themes. An icon will be generated automatically based on the colors and background color you set.

Go to your profile settings and define your newly created theme as default.

Note: As a business admin, you can choose to save the new theme under your organization, making it available for your colleagues. Premium users and non-admins can save themes under their profiles.