Choosing a Theme
Your site theme is the foundation of how your site looks. It sets the colors and fonts used everywhere, so every page and section stays consistent without you styling each block by hand.
What a theme controls
A theme bundles two things:
- Colors — your background, text, and accent colors (the palette used by buttons, links, and highlights).
- Fonts — the heading and body typefaces.
Behind the scenes the theme also sets consistent spacing, borders, and shadows, so everything feels designed as one piece.
The default theme
New sites start on New Salon Original — the official New Salon look: Salon red on the Satoshi typeface. It's the system theme and a great starting point for making the look your own.
Picking colors and fonts
You don't have to take a theme as-is. Colors and fonts are chosen independently, so you can keep the fonts you like and swap just the palette (or the reverse).
Colors
The color picker is a grid of palettes grouped by mood:
| Group | Feel |
|---|---|
| Salon | The built-in Salon palettes |
| Light & Airy | Soft, breezy neutrals |
| Earth & Clay | Warm terracotta and cream |
| Cool & Moody | Slate and harbor tones |
| Neutral & Quiet | Bone, paper, ash |
| Bold Accent | One strong color on calm ground |
| Editorial | Ink-on-paper contrast |
| Nature | Sage, olive, pacific |
| Retro | Faded, vintage coastal |
| Tropical | Bright, high-energy |
Click any palette to apply it. The selected one shows a checkmark. Palettes marked Light + Dark include both a light and a dark version.
Fonts
Choose a curated heading/body font pairing — from clean sans-serif options to editorial serif combinations. Each pairing is designed to read well together at any size.
Light, dark, and auto
Themes can run in Light, Dark, or Auto mode. Auto follows each visitor's device preference, showing your light palette to people in light mode and your dark palette to people in dark mode (for palettes that include both).
How themes cascade
Theme settings inherit top-down:
Site → Page → Section
- Set it once at the site level and it applies everywhere.
- Override it on a single page when one page needs a different look.
- Override it on a single section for a one-off accent.
A page override beats the site setting, and a section override beats the page. Anything you don't override keeps inheriting from the level above.
Going live
Theme changes show in the editor as you make them. When you leave edit mode (Stop Editing, or the Preview pencil in the floating toolbar), the cache clears and your published site updates for visitors.
Want to fine-tune individual blocks instead of the whole site? See the related design docs for per-block styling and image card styles.