Color Themes enable your organization to streamline the use of colors throughout its email marketing outreach. Whether your organization has one or many divisions/subsidiaries, or one or many accounts/sub-accounts, these themes ensure that only approved colors are used in your account's emails.

Permissions

Color Themes are a permission-based feature that must be enabled at the account level and at the individual user (login) level. Themes can be limited to one or more of your Admins, or enabled for one or more users based on permissions set up by an Admin.

Additionally, Color Themes can be enabled or disabled at the email-template level:

Some templates may have permissions enabled so that Color Themes can be used, added, or edited.
Others may be locked with no access to Color Themes or lack the ability to add or edit Color Themes.

These settings are dependent on options set in your account.

NOTE: It's possible to create account-wide themes that are available to everyone, regardless of their permissions. Refer to the Create a custom theme section below to learn more.

Access color themes

In the Design tab (available only in the Email Designer view), you can quickly change the various background colors of your message using various pre-built Color Themes. You also have the flexibility and control to create your own Color Themes to match the branding of your organization or any other look you may want.

As you can see by comparing the two images below, you can quickly change the overall look of a message with the click of a button.

Apply a theme

The main thing to understand about themes is you can apply design options for your message and for individual Zones, and the options that are available depend on whether a Zone is or is not selected.

Zone not selected

When a Zone is not selected, you can apply options that affect your message. You can:

Select a pre-built theme or create your own to control the color of your content, columns, borders, and background.
Set a body background color using any color from your current theme. The body background color fills the entire area surrounding your message (it's the light blue color in the image above), and helps offset your main email message.
Choose a default font for your message. This doesn't affect any text already in place, only text you subsequently add.

Zone selected

When a Zone is selected, additional options become available allowing you to modify that individual Zone.

From the Section Background Color menu, you can set a background color for your Zone using any color from your current theme.
In the Zone Styles area, you can:
Apply a border around the Zone, controlling its width (in pixels) and its color. For even more flexibility, check the Apply side-specific borders box to set unique borders for the top, bottom, and sides.
Apply padding (in pixels) within the Zone. For even more flexibility, check the Apply side-specific padding box to set unique padding for the top, bottom, left, and right edges of the Zone.

Create a custom theme

On the Design tab:

Click the + Add new theme button.
In the Theme Settings area at the bottom:

Give the theme a name.
Decide whether you want this to be an account-wide theme, meaning it will be available to ALL users, regardless of their permissions. If you do, check the Make account-wide theme box. This is a great way to make certain themes available to everyone in your account. Refer to the Notes about account-wide themes below to learn more.

Click the boxes to the right of each field to display the color picker, where you can set a color by:

clicking and dragging in the color spectrum area and associated slider column to the right,
specifying RGB values, or
specifying a color's six-digit hexadecimal number (this is the best way to get an exact color).

Notes about account-wide themes

The ability to create and edit account-wide themes is limited to Theme admins.
Account-wide themes are available for all messages and templates within an account regardless of enterprise rules.
Editing an account-wide theme displays a warning indicating changes will affect all existing templates/messages using the theme.
Deleting an account-wide theme is permanent, and will remove it from all templates/messages to which it was applied. These templates/messages will have their theme set to "None."

Select a custom theme

All of your custom themes are available in the Current Theme menu.

Custom themes are listed at the bottom.