Brand Styles: One Look for Every Widget on Every Screen

A clock in one typeface, a news ticker in another and a calendar in a third is what most screens look like once a few widgets have been added by a few people. Each one looked fine when it was made. Together they look like nobody is in charge.

Brand styles fix that in one place. You set your fonts, your colours and a text size once for the workspace, and every widget on every screen follows them.

Six Settings, Not Sixty

Brand styles are a card under Settings, General. There are six things to set:

• Headline font. The large text: the digits of a clock, a news headline, the temperature.
• Body font. Everything else. It can simply follow the headline font.
• Text size. Compact, Default or Large, scaling the text of every widget together.
• Background. What the widget is drawn on.
• Text. Left alone, it is picked to read well on your background.
• Accent. The highlights: a clock's seconds, a ticker's dots, today in a calendar.

Every Google font is in the list. On the Business plan you can upload your own typefaces and pick those too.

Auto Means "Leave It As It Is"

You do not have to fill everything in. A setting you have not touched reads Auto, and the widget keeps its own design there. Set only a headline font and an accent colour, and that is all that changes.

That makes it safe to try on a workspace that is already live. Nothing shifts on a screen until you set something, and any one setting can be put back to Auto on its own.

A Preview Drawn by the Player

The preview beside the settings is not a mock-up. It is the same player that runs on your screens, drawing a real widget with the styles you are editing, and it redraws on every change before anything is saved.

Three controls let you test properly:

• Widget. Look at a clock, a ticker, news, weather or a calendar.
• Zone shape. A full screen, half a screen, a strip along the bottom, or a portrait screen. A ticker in a strip is a different test from a ticker filling the display.
• Preview with. Sample content, or one of your own widgets.

Not every widget uses every setting. A line under the fields says what each one does on the widget you are looking at, so there is no guessing why the accent colour did nothing on the weather.

Saving Reaches the Screens

Most changes in Signital are drafts until you publish. Brand styles are the exception: a workspace's look is a setting, not a piece of content, so saving it updates your displays straight away. Use the preview to get it right first.

When One Widget Needs to Differ

Sometimes a widget should not match: a promotion in campaign colours, or a dashboard on a dark wall. Each widget has its own Custom styles card with the same six settings. Switch it on, change what needs changing, and everything you leave alone keeps following the brand.

If overrides pile up over time, Reset widget overrides on the Brand styles card clears them all and brings every widget back to the brand. It asks first, and it cannot be undone.

Getting Started

1. Open Settings, then General, and find Brand styles.
2. Pick a headline font and an accent colour. Leave the rest on Auto.
3. Check the clock, the ticker and the calendar in the preview, in a full screen and in a strip.
4. Add a background only if your content sits on one. The text colour follows it.
5. Save.

Five minutes, and every screen you have looks like it belongs to the same organisation. The field-by-field reference is in the Brand styles documentation, and the widgets guide covers what you can put on a screen in the first place.