[Looker Studio]How to Use Themes to Define the Style of the Entire Report | A Clear Explanation with Images

This article provides a detailed, image-rich explanation of themes used to customize the appearance of reports in Looker Studio. There are three ways to apply themes: selecting from pre-built themes, creating a custom theme by adjusting detailed settings, or generating a theme from an image. Set up a theme and create visually appealing, easy-to-read reports with a high level of design.

What is a Theme in Looker Studio?

Looker Studio offers themes that define the colors of graphs and the text styles across an entire report. With themes, you can easily change the overall design of your reports. There are three ways to apply themes:

1. Using pre-built themes – Simply select a design from the available options.
2. Customizing an original theme – Adjust the styles to create a personalized look.
3. Creating a theme from an image – Generate a theme based on the colors from an uploaded image.

Make the most of themes to design visually appealing and easy-to-read reports that suit your preferences.

Default Theme

When creating a new report, the default theme with the following design is applied to the report. However, if the report is copied from another report, the theme set in the original report will be applied.

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How to Change the Theme

This section explains how to change the default theme. First, click on "Theme and Layout" either from the File menu at the top or from the Theme and Layout option in the upper right corner.

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A screen for selecting the following themes will appear.

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 Click on your preferred theme from the available options. The selected theme will be instantly applied to the report. In this example, the "Simple" theme has been applied.

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In addition to this, a total of 18 pre-prepared themes are available as of October 8, 2024. The default theme is also one of the pre-prepared themes, so if you wish to revert to it, simply select "Default" from the list of themes.

How to Create a Custom Theme

If you want to create your own original theme or make minor adjustments to a pre-made theme, customization is also possible. This section provides a detailed explanation of the customization options available. Start by selecting "Customize" from the list of themes.

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Primary styles

You can configure the primary style settings of the report.

Background

You can change the background color of the report to your preferred color. Additionally, you can apply gradient settings, as shown in the image below.

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Text style

You can specify the colors of dimensions, the text color, and the font. For dimension colors, you can also assign specific colors to particular dimension values.

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Chart title color

In this section, you can specify the background color, border color, shape, border thickness, transparency, and border style of the chart.

 

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Border Shadow

You can choose whether to apply shadows to the borders.

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Accent styles

You can specify the color of secondary text and the background color of secondary components. To make it easy to distinguish what counts as "secondary," the following image shows the main text in black, the secondary text in red, and the background of secondary components in yellow.

Textbox styles

You can configure styles that apply exclusively to the text box component. Options include setting the background, font color, font, link style, and hiding borders. In the image below, only the top-left text box has different styles for elements such as color and borders compared to other graphs and text.

Data styles

In the Data Style section, you can make detailed adjustments to the content of the chart.

Chart palette

 You can specify the colors for dimensions. It is confirmed that the order of colors in the pie chart matches the order of colors in the palette of this combo chart.

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Chart styling default

You can set the color of the bar chart borders and the contrast of the text here. In the image below, the border color of the bar chart is set to black, and the contrast is set to low. The contrast affects the color of the text inside the pie chart.

Component grid style

You can specify the color of the gridlines in tables or bar graphs. In this example, the color is set to blue.

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Positive and negative change style

You can specify the color of the arrows indicating the rate of increase or decrease when setting up a comparison of figures. By default, an increase is shown in green, and a decrease in red.

Chart header

You can select the display format and color of the graph headers used when configuring drill-downs, optional metrics, and metric sliders. The display format options include always visible, visible on hover, or hidden.

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Bar width

You can adjust the width of the bars in the bar chart.

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How to Create Themes from Images

One way to create a custom theme is by generating it from an image. This method is useful when you want to design reports that align with your company's logo or website style.

First, click on Extract theme from image in the theme settings menu. 

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You can specify an image either by uploading it from your computer or providing a URL. In this case, I selected the logo image of 88studio. As a result, three theme variations are generated based on the selected image. 

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 Select your preferred style and click "Apply" in the bottom right corner.

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 The selected style will be applied as a theme. If you want to fine-tune specific elements, you can make adjustments from the customization options.

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Notes

Lastly, here are some points to keep in mind when using themes.

Themes are not shared across reports. If you want to use the theme from one report in another, copy the original report and create a new one.

The applied theme affects the entire report. If you want to use a different style for individual graphs, you can change the style of those specific graphs to override the theme settings.