Adapt the theme to your brand

When you start a new project, one of the first things that you will need to do is to adapt the look and feel of Front-Commerce to match your brand’s style.

Obviously, it is not something that can be done in just a few minutes because your identity shines in the details. However, you can do all the heavy lifting pretty quickly by customizing what is called Design Tokens.

And it’s a great way to familiarize yourself with Front-Commerce!

Get your Design Tokens

This concept is often closely related to Design Systems. Basically Design Tokens are the core styles of your design: colors, font families, font sizes, borders, shadows, etc. Together they are what make your brand unique.

There even exist tools that extract those tokens from existing websites. In this example, we will use CSS Stats to extract Design Tokens from Smashing Magazine and use them later.

If you want to learn more about it, you can have a look at Design tokens for dummies which is a very nice introduction.

Apply these tokens to your theme

Now that we’ve got our Design Tokens, let’s apply them to Front-Commerce’s base theme.

Since we use the Atomic Design principles, the tokens are within atoms of our base theme. From your application, you will find the base theme in the node_modules/front-commerce/src/web/ directory and atoms under its theme/components/atoms subdirectory.

In this guide, we’ll focus on the colors and the typography settings. But feel free to go further and edit buttons, form inputs, etc.

Colors

In order to style our HTML, we use Sass, the well-known CSS preprocessor. Thus, the design tokens often translate to Sass variables.

For instance, if we want to edit the colors of our application, we need to override the one defined in the core. To do so:

1. override the theme/components/atoms/Colors/_colors.scss theme file in your theme:

   mkdir -p src/web/theme/components/atoms/Colors/
   cp node_modules/front-commerce/src/web/theme/components/atoms/Colors/_colors.scss \
     src/web/theme/components/atoms/Colors/_colors.scss
   

2. restart the application so the override is detected

3. edit the colors as needed

In Smashing Magazine’s case it would be:

// src/web/theme/components/atoms/Colors/_colors.scss
-$brandPrimary: #666699;
-$brandSecondary: #818199;
+$brandPrimary: #d33a2c;
+$brandSecondary: #2da2c5;

-$fontColor: #131433;
+$fontColor: #333;

Typography

We could change the fonts to match Smashing Magazine’s in a similar way. Fonts are defined in theme/components/atoms/Typography/_typography.scss. The difference here is that we will also introduce a different font for headings and that we will have to allow the remote font domain in the CSP headers.

Follow the same steps than for colors:

1. override the theme/components/atoms/Typography/_typography.scss and theme/components/atoms/Typography/Heading/_Heading.scss theme files in your theme:

   mkdir -p src/web/theme/components/atoms/Typography/Heading
   cp node_modules/front-commerce/src/web/theme/components/atoms/Typography/_typography.scss \
     src/web/theme/components/atoms/Typography/_typography.scss
   cp node_modules/front-commerce/src/web/theme/components/atoms/Typography/Heading/_Heading.scss \
     src/web/theme/components/atoms/Typography/Heading/_Heading.scss
   

2. restart the application so the override is detected

3. edit the fonts as needed

   // src/web/theme/components/atoms/Typography/_typography.scss
   -$fontFamily: "Roboto", "Arial Helvetica", "Arial", sans-serif;
   +@font-face {
   +  font-family: "Elena";
   +  font-display: swap;
   +  src: url("https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/a978f759fa0230c1e590d1bdb5a1c03ceb538cec/fed6b/fonts/elenawebregular/elenawebregular.woff2")
   +    format("woff2");
   +}
   +
   +@font-face {
   +  font-family: "Mija";
   +  font-display: swap;
   +  src: url("https://d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net/b324ee03d5048d2d1831100e323b0b6336ffce68/0445e/fonts/mijaregular/mija_regular-webfont.woff2")
   +    format("woff2");
   +}
   +
   +$fontFamily: Elena, Georgia, serif;
   +$titleFontFamily: Mija, Arial, sans-serif;
   
   // src/web/theme/components/atoms/Typography/Heading/_Heading.scss
    @mixin heading($f-size) {
   +  font-family: $titleFontFamily;
      font-size: $f-size;
      font-weight: bold;
    }
   

4. allow d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net (the domain we have included fonts from) in your CSP font-src header value configured in src/config/website.js

   // src/config/website.js
          imgSrc: [],
   -      fontSrc: [],
   +      fontSrc: ["d33wubrfki0l68.cloudfront.net"],
          connectSrc: [],
   

A new look

Front-Commerce would then now look like this:

Sure it still needs tweaking, but as you can see, it is already far better. Furthermore, it is an easy first step to start convincing your team and clients that using modern front-end technologies is for the best.

You can experiment further by changing other tokens such as spacing, form inputs, buttons…

Expand your brand theme

Please note that all we’ve been talking about until now was to adapt the existing to your convenience. However, that is not the only benefit of having a Design System already in place. It is actually a perfect canvas to help you creating new components and styles matching to your brand.

See the next section to learn more about this.