How to change colour theme in your Figma UI kit

In this quick tutorial, learn how to change all our old blue brand colour in the app UI to the new purple brand color! 💙→💜

If you’re building a design system UI kit in Figma, or adopting a UI library someone from your team has put together, you’d probably want to make the colour theme customisable and flexible for each app’s unique branding.

You’ve seen how we did this in Sketch. So how does Figma handle colour style management in UI kits? Here’s a step-by-step guide.

Note: Author is using Figma Release 85 at time of writing.

Step 1: Make sure your components are built using Color Styles.

All branded blue components built with Color Style.

Make sure the layers that contain your brand colours — fills, strokes, texts etc, named here as “Primary”, are built using our bright blue brand colour in Color Style.

Step 2: On selected Color style click on Edit Style icon.

You can edit a color style from a selected layer or from Local Styles panel.

Let’s say your product has a new brand colour and we need to change all the components containing the old brand blue (Primary), to this new colour. Select on the Primary blue first, then click on the Color Style palette.

Step 3: Change it to the new brand colour of your app.

Select the new colour from here.

Step 4: No more step 4??

Confession time: I’m a long-time Sketch user before I started researching for this article, because my design team currently uses different tools. And I admit that this discovery is really a big draw for me to switch to the Figma camp. Figma manages colour styles purely for colour such that if you’re using this particular #colour, anywhere in the app, no matter if its a solid fill, a stroke, or text colour.

Recap: Use Color Styles. Edit Color Style.

Once you update the colour code, Figma immediately renders the same colour used everywhere else in the app. Boom. No more separate layer styles to update! This could potentially save us so much time.

Perhaps there is a downside to this I haven’t yet discover… Maybe someone from the Team Sketch can try to convince me?

Comment below if you have any questions! Or let me know which tool you think handles colour style management better. 👇

If you like, check out how we did the same thing in Sketch:

How to change the colour theme in your Sketch UI library