Style a dashboard with themes

A dashboard looks finished when its charts, cards and background agree with each other. The Dashboard formatting panel sets all of that for the whole sheet at once, so you don't have to style each chart by hand.

Open Dashboard formatting

On a dashboard, click the paintbrush icon at the top of the icon column on the right rail. Its tooltip reads "Dashboard formatting". The panel opens with the line "Applies to every card on this sheet." - everything in it rewrites every card on the dashboard you are looking at, including tweaks you made to single cards.

Pick a theme

The Themes section shows each theme as a card: its palette as a color bar, its name set in its own typeface, and the card itself carrying the theme's shadow. The built-in themes are Default, Corporate, Minimal, Bold, Elegant, Dashboard, Presentation, Jewel, Forest, Vibrant, Pastel and Berry.

Click a card to apply it. A theme is a whole look, not just colors: it recolors every chart and also sets the dashboard typeface, card padding and card shadow. One undo puts all of it back.

• My palettes - custom palettes you made in settings. Applying one changes the chart colors only, and leaves the typeface and cards alone.
• Saved - themes you saved from a chart. Hover a saved theme and click the trash icon to delete it.

The active theme is outlined. If you recolor one chart by hand so the charts no longer agree, no theme is marked. Themes only appears when the dashboard has charts, and you can collapse it to reach the controls below; collapsed, its header still shows the palette in use.

Make a palette from your brand

Custom palettes live in settings, under Preferences, in the Chart colors block. They apply to you only. In the palette editor, the Start from field takes "Your website URL, or describe your brand".

1. 1Click Create palette, or New palette once you have one.
2. 2Paste your website address into Start from, or describe the look you want, then click Generate. You can also click Import from image to pull colors from a picture.
3. 3Check the swatches, name the palette, and save it.

When you start from a website, Golden reads the colors from the site itself and the editor shows "Extracted from" followed by the site's name. If the site can't be read, you still get a palette generated from the name, and the editor tells you so.

Set the typeface

Typeface sets the Dashboard font for every title, label and text box on the sheet. The collapsed row shows the current font's name set in that font.

Style the cards

Card style controls the box around every chart, KPI and text card. Its collapsed row draws a small preview card with the real corner radius and shadow.

• Corner radius - from square corners (0px) up to 100px.
• Card padding - the space between a card's border and its content, from 0 to 24px.
• Border - None, Thin, Thick, Dashed or Double, with a Border color.
• Card shadow - Off, S, M, L or XL.

Two more Card style sliders let a card show what sits behind it. Drag Card opacity below 100% and every card's fill - its theme color, its own color, or the theme card - is thinned rather than replaced, so an animated scene or textured page shows through; the Glass button beside it sets a see-through, frosted look in one move. Background blur, which turns on once the cards are see-through, frosts whatever shows through them. Adding an animated background turns the cards to glass for you, unless you have set the card opacity yourself.

To change the inside spacing of one card only, select it and use the Margins slider in its Format panel. It runs from 0 to 24, and hovering the control previews the margins on the canvas.

Set an accent color

Accent color sets a Dashboard accent that the board uses wherever a color is picked automatically, such as sparklines, progress fills and a chart's main series. Type a hex value, choose one of the preset swatches, or click the clear button to go back to automatic colors. A new dashboard starts with no accent.

Change the canvas background

Canvas background sets what sits behind the cards. Choose a Type of Solid Color, Gradient or Animated.

• Solid Color - pick from presets such as White, Slate 50, Warm white, Sky, Blush and Cream, darker ones like Slate 900 and Deep teal, or enter your own color.
• Gradient - set a Start and End color and the angle, or pick a preset gradient such as Mist, Sky, Sunset, Aurora or Midnight.
• Animated - a moving scene behind the cards. Pick one of six presets - Code rain, Platformer world, Starfield, Snowfall, Synthwave grid and Film grain - or a Custom scene that Golden composes from a chat request.

An animated background can also come from a chat request - "put a snowfall scene behind this board" - or from the design brief of an AI-generated dashboard, which composes a Custom scene; its row reads "Made in chat - ask Golden to change it". To keep a scene, type a name in the Scene box and click Save: it joins the Saved list for reuse on another board, and a saved dashboard theme carries its scene with it. Switching the Type back to Solid Color or Gradient drops the scene.

Fine-tune the design language

Below the canvas background sits Design language, collapsed by default. Where the sections above set a theme and the broad card and color choices, this is the fine control over the board's visual tokens - the place to adjust a single ink role or heading treatment without rebuilding the rest of the look. Expand it to reach the controls, and use its Reset button to clear your changes back to the theme's own tokens.

• Ink - the colors for Headings, Body, Numbers and Muted text, plus the Accent, Positive and Negative roles.
• Surfaces - Card fill and Emphasis fill.
• Shadow - a flat, offset shadow with its own color and offset.
• Headings - font, weight, case, letter spacing, color and an optional rule below.
• Numbers - font, weight, color and even-digit alignment.
• Charts - mark radius, mark outline, gridlines and axis ink.
• Card chrome by role - styles Metrics, Charts, Text cards and Tables cards separately.

Override one card's design

The design language applies to every card, but a single card can step away from it. Select a card and its Properties panel shows only the design rows that card actually draws, each sitting over the board's tokens. Adjust the card's rule (Card rule, Card rule color, Card rule style) or its heading (Heading letter spacing, Heading case, Heading glyph). An unset control reads "Board" and follows the board; the reset button beside a changed one, "Reset to the board's design", puts it back.

Save the whole board as a theme

At the bottom of the panel, Saved dashboard themes captures a whole board's look - its page, cards, type and design language - as a reusable theme. This is separate from the chart format templates saved under the Themes section's Saved group. Type a name in the "Name this look" box and click Save; the theme then appears in the list below, where clicking it applies it to the current sheet and the trash icon deletes it. Saved dashboard themes are shared across your account.

Colors stay the same across charts

On a dashboard, a category value gets one color for the whole board. If two charts are both colored by Segment, Corporate is the same color on both, even when the charts list the segments in a different order.

• Assigning a color to a value on one chart (Color section, under Assign colors) changes that value on every chart on the dashboard.
• Changing the color template redraws the automatic colors but keeps the ones you picked by hand.
• Reset under Assign colors, or applying a theme, puts the colors back to automatic.

The colors are saved with the dashboard, so they don't reshuffle when you reload or when a filter hides a category.

Let the AI suggest a style

In the AI tab of the dashboard's left pane, the Styles section offers ready-made looks - Briefing, Simple 1, Simple 2 and Minimalist - plus style ideas generated for your data. Click Get Style Ideas to fetch them, Suggest more styles for another batch, and Apply on the one you want. Under Describe your own, write the look you're after (for example, a warm editorial feel with serif headings) and click Create & apply.