One product, eleven moods: how per-event themes work

The gallery for a 60th birthday party and the gallery for a corporate offsite should not look like the same product wearing a different logo. So they don’t — and the difference is a colour picker, not a rebuild.

What a theme actually controls

Every event gets a small set of tokens: a primary colour, an accent, a background (flat or a two-stop fade, in a choice of directions), a heading font, and a corner-radius feel from square to very round. Hosts also drop in their own logo, hero image and icon if they have them. Nothing here touches layout, spacing or the accessibility floor underneath it — those stay fixed so a half-finished theme still renders legibly.

We ship eleven presets to start from — birthday, wedding, corporate, midnight, neon, sunset, garden, retro, futuristic and a couple of others — each one a considered starting point, not a random palette generator. A host can take any preset and nudge it, or start from a blank slate and pick every value themselves.

The part that doesn’t move

The structure underneath every theme is deliberately the same: one primary action per screen, large tap targets, plain words instead of jargon, visible state instead of a bare spinner. “Playful and loud” is a real option, but it’s delivered entirely through colour, shape, type and copy — never by adding a step or spending someone’s attention. A gaudy neon theme and the plainest default theme are the same number of taps from “type your name” to “see the gallery.”

Contrast is checked, not assumed

The moment a host can pick their own colours is the moment someone will pick white text on pale yellow. Every theme — preset or custom — runs through the same contrast check before it’s allowed to ship, against the actual foreground/background pairs it produces. A host can still make a bold choice. They can’t make an illegible one.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A guest at a wedding doesn’t think “nice theming.” They think “this feels like it was made for this wedding” — and that feeling is most of what makes a stranger’s product feel like it belongs at someone else’s party.