AddThisFeature

Theme Customizer

Let a customer restyle their own space and watch the change happen as they make it.

involved Editors & Builders

What it adds

A settings surface where a customer adjusts colours, typography, spacing and corner radius for their workspace, with a live preview.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Build this on top of the app's existing theme tokens rather than beside them. If the library already includes Semantic Color Tokens, OKLCH Theme Tokens or Theme Surface Map, the customizer edits those token values and nothing else; a second styling path will drift out of sync within a release.

  2. 2

    Group the controls the way a customer thinks: brand colour, text and surfaces, typography, spacing, corners. Keep each group small enough that someone can change one thing and see what moved.

  3. 3

    Show the preview inside the real interface, not a mock swatch panel. If Theme Preview Sandbox exists, render the customizer's preview through it.

  4. 4

    Derive the full palette from one or two brand inputs and let advanced users override individual tokens afterwards. Asking a non-designer to pick fourteen colours produces fourteen bad colours.

  5. 5

    Do not let customer input reach the page as raw style text. Parse every value into a known type, reject anything that is not a valid colour, length or font choice, and never concatenate the input into a style declaration.

Edge cases it handles

8
  • A customer will pick a brand colour that leaves text unreadable on it. Check the contrast of every generated foreground and background pair, and either refuse the combination with a plain explanation or correct the derived foreground automatically. If Colour Contrast Guardrails already exists, call into it rather than re-deriving the maths.
  • Both light and dark appearances must come out of a single brand colour. A palette that only works in one mode leaves half the customer's users with white text on white cards.
  • The preview must not persist. Changes stay local until the customer confirms, and abandoning the screen or losing the connection leaves the live workspace exactly as it was.
  • Reset must work per group as well as globally. A customer who wants their spacing back should not have to throw away the colour work they just finished.
  • Injected values must not escape their token. A colour field that accepts a full declaration, a URL, or a closing brace lets one customer alter the layout of a page for everyone in their workspace.
  • A font choice that fails to load must fall back to a readable stack without shifting the layout, and the customizer should say the font did not load rather than silently showing something else.
  • A theme saved under an older token set must be migrated or discarded on upgrade, never applied partially. Half a theme looks worse than none.
  • Custom themes must not override states that carry meaning. Destructive, error and warning treatments stay distinguishable no matter what the customer picks.

Definition of done

9
  • The customizer writes to the app's existing theme tokens and introduces no parallel styling path.
  • Changes preview live inside the real interface and are discarded unless the customer confirms.
  • A single brand colour produces a coherent light and dark palette.
  • Every generated text and surface pair meets the app's contrast minimum, or the combination is refused with an explanation.
  • Each control group has its own reset alongside a global reset.
  • No customer-supplied value reaches the page as unparsed style text.
  • Themes stored against a previous token set are migrated or cleared on upgrade.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.