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A theme is a set of colours, two fonts, a corner radius and a button shape. Applying one restyles every block in the email in one step. There are 20 ready-made themes, light and dark, with the same names and colours as the landing page themes, so an email and its landing page can match.

Pick a theme

  1. Open a template in the email builder.
  2. Click an empty part of the canvas, or Email Layout Settings, to open the Styles tab.
  3. In the Theme section, pick a theme. Use All, Light and Dark to filter the list, or search by name.
The canvas updates straight away. Picking another theme later swaps the colours cleanly, because the builder remembers which colour was the background, the card colour, the footer band and the accent.

Customise it

Below the theme list are three tabs:
  • Colours: the email body, the backdrop behind it, sections and cards, the footer band, text, secondary text, the accent, a second accent and borders. If a text colour is hard to read on the email body, a contrast warning shows the ratio. Aim for at least 4.5:1.
  • Type: the heading font and the body font.
  • Shape: the corner radius of containers and cards, and the button shape (rectangle, rounded or pill).
Once you change a value the theme is called Custom. Reset brings back the original theme.

Use your brand

Use brand builds a theme from your workspace brand kit: your primary colour becomes the accent, and your background, text colour and fonts are used where you have set them.

Save a workspace theme

Save as workspace theme stores the current theme for the whole workspace. New templates then start in it: templates you create, library templates you copy and drafts from the Design Assistant. Templates that already have a theme keep theirs. Use workspace theme applies the saved theme to the template you have open.

Apply a theme to many templates

  1. Go to Templates → My templates.
  2. Click Select, then tick the templates you want to change. Select all ticks every template in the current list.
  3. Click Apply theme, pick a theme and click Apply.
You can select up to 50 templates at a time. A message tells you how many were updated and how many were skipped, and why:
  • Hand-written HTML or MJML: themes only work on templates built with blocks, so these are left as they are.
  • Already had this theme: nothing to change.
  • Not found: the template was deleted, or belongs to another workspace.
Each updated template gets a new version in its history, so you can go back. If your workspace uses template approval and you can’t approve templates yourself, an approved template goes back for review.

What changes and what stays

A theme changes:
  • background colours of the email, sections, cards and the footer band;
  • text, heading, link and border colours;
  • button colours and shape, including buttons in hero banners, polls, countdowns and item lists;
  • fonts, where a block uses the email’s default font;
  • corner radius, where a container already had rounded corners.
A theme leaves alone:
  • your words, links and merge tags;
  • images, QR codes and hero banner backgrounds;
  • padding, sizes, alignment and layout;
  • a font you chose for one block that differs from the email’s default font.
Colours inside rich-text and HTML blocks are restyled as well, by role: a dark section stays a dark section in the new theme’s colours, body text stays body text, and a link stays a link. The markup itself is not changed.

Dark mode

A themed email carries its own dark-mode colours. A dark theme keeps its own palette, and a light theme gets a dark version built from its footer band and accent. Mail apps that support dark-mode styles, such as Apple Mail, iOS Mail and Outlook, use these colours instead of a generic grey. Some apps remove email styles, for example the Gmail app when it shows a non-Gmail account. Readers there see the light colours, and the app may darken the email in its own way. Use the dark-mode switch on the builder’s Preview tab to check how the email looks, and send a test to the apps your readers use.