Themes
A theme is a saved look you can drop onto any form: the colours, fonts, spacing, and shape, all bundled together. Apply one and your whole form changes in a click. Save your own and reuse it everywhere.
You'll find themes in a panel on the side of the Styling tab, the last of the three tabs in the Form Builder. Data Maker ships with a few ready-made themes, and you can build your own on top of them.
What's in a theme
A theme carries the overall look of a form, not its content. When you apply one, it sets:
- Colours: the accent colour, text, backgrounds, borders, and the small state colours (error, success, links, focus).
- Light and dark: a separate set of colours for each, so the form looks right on a light or dark screen.
- Fonts: the typeface and sizes for headings, labels, and body text.
- Spacing & shape: the gaps between fields, border thickness, corner rounding, and how dense or roomy the form feels.
- Buttons: the default look of your primary, secondary, and subtle buttons.
- Layout touches: where labels sit, the required-field marker, and the wizard step bar.
What's not in a theme
A theme never touches your form's content or structure. Switching themes won't change:
- Your questions and fields: labels, choices, scale ends, descriptions.
- The layout: where things sit on the page.
- Your checks, calculations, buttons and steps.
- Any records you've collected.
So you can try a dozen themes without any worry: only the appearance moves.
Applying a theme
Click any theme in the panel and your form puts it on straight away. The live preview updates so you can see the result before you commit to anything. Try a few until one fits.
Applying a theme is a fresh start. It clears any per-field colours and one-off tweaks you'd made earlier so the form follows the new theme cleanly. Your content stays (scale ends, choices, and labels are kept), but custom colours are reset to the theme's. If you want a colour back, set it again in the details panel afterwards.
Saving your own theme
Got a look you like? Save it as a theme of your own so you can reuse it on other forms. Use Save current look in the panel, give it a memorable name like “Company blue”, and it joins your library. Your saved themes sit alongside the built-in ones, ready to apply anywhere.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Apply | Click a theme to dress the whole form in that look. The preview updates instantly. |
| Save current look | Bottle up your current styling as a new theme so you can reuse it on other forms. |
| Export | Save one of your themes out to a file so you can share it. |
| Import | Bring in a theme file someone shared with you, then apply it or keep it in your library. |
Sharing a theme
Themes travel as small theme files. Export one from your library to get a file you can email or hand to a colleague. They import it on their machine and your look turns up in their library, ready to apply, a quick way to keep every form across a team on the same brand.
Build your house style once, save it as a theme, and export it. Everyone else imports the one file instead of matching colours by hand. When the brand changes, update the theme and re-share.
Built-in themes
Data Maker comes with a small set of ready-made themes, including a clean default. These are always there to fall back on. You can apply a built-in theme and then tweak it, but the originals can't be overwritten. Saving your changes makes a new theme of your own and leaves the built-in one untouched.
Fine-tuning after a theme
A theme sets the baseline. For the exact shade or spacing on one part, click it in the preview and use the details panel (the inspector). See Look & feel for how that works. Just remember those one-off tweaks get cleared the next time you apply a theme.
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