Tome Blog

Color is an essential expression vector in visual storytelling. Sometimes we want our stories to feel bold and cinematic (the inspo behind Tome's original “Dark” theme). Or, we might want colors to feel playful, reflective, or match a brand book.

After we launched our beta in March, many of our early users told us they wanted a wider range of color options, as well as an easy way to use their own brand colors. We didn't want color application to be the painstaking hassle they were used to.

So a few months ago, we set out to build a themes product that would let you instantly apply your brand colors across a tome or make your own theme. And we wanted your theme to automatically look 

If you'd like to dive in deep, here's the tome we used to kick off the project: 

1. Color shouldn't distract from the content. 

We don't think color should be a random wallpaper or compete with your narrative. It should always complement or spotlight your ideas.

2. Achieving color harmony shouldn't be time-consuming or hard

. It should be frictionless. And you shouldn't need to be a color theorist to build your own magical, harmonious themes.

Our now-live themes product hinges on both ideas. Now with themes, you can apply brand colors across your tome with a click. And if you want to create a new theme, our magic color assistant, the Auto toggle, lets you instantly make an attractive, legible theme. (We'll dive into how it works in a sec).

The result: you never have to worry if the colors across your tome's text, background, and UI jive. Most importantly, 

your story looks put together no matter what.

Jesse C

Product Design

Tome gives you full control over your theme and color choices. But there's no reason you should have to make every decision manually if you don't want to—that's where the Auto color toggle comes in.

When flicked on, Auto color makes sure every colored element on your tome, i.e., a page background, text, embed, a table, or your workspace—looks beautiful and easy to view. You just make one choice—your page color—and Tome takes care of the rest.

When you choose a page color, Auto color is turned on by default. Your tome's canvas, heading, and text colors automatically adjust to jive with your background.

You can save any theme you like to use again. Or if you have a brand theme, you can create it using the eye dropper or Hex values and save it, so anyone in your workspace can use it too.

If Tome's Auto color picks don't fit the bill, you can always veto them with the colors of your choice.

With just a click, you can apply any saved or preset theme to update your whole tome.

Behind Auto color is an original color algorithm made by Tome's design team. That color algorithm operates in what's called the LCH color space (more on that soon). When a page color is chosen, Tome makes a series of decisions on the fly to output a color palette that prioritizes:

Monochromatic cohesion (making sure key elements share an underlying hue)

LCH stands for “Lightness Chroma Hue.” This color space (aka a fixed range of possible colors) differs in some key ways from other color spaces like sRGB, which is historically used in design tools. For Tome, LCH was a better choice for themes because:

LCH is perceptively uniform, which means that modifying any of its three variables by a certain amount will always have the same perceptual color difference to the human eye.

Most monitors can display far more colors than what the sRGB space covers. LCH lets us tap into a wider range of colors, which tend to be vivid and beautiful.

When a page color is chosen, it's converted to LCH. Based on its inherent chroma and luminance, the base color is then used to generate complementary title, body, and canvas colors.

Depending on where a base color falls in the LCH color space, 

 are tweaked to achieve a monochromatic theme that's perceptively uniform, easy to view and read, and just looks great.

An important, but less obvious part of themes' magic is making sure that Tome's UI and native elements like tables are legible with your colors. So, when you adjust your theme selection, Tome's UI will automatically switch between light and dark modes to provide enough contrast between the UI and your tome's colors.

Tome's UI controls are based on an assessment of page color and relative luminance, a linear measure of light that's weighted for human vision. If the luminance is above 30%, Tome switches to a light UI. If it is below 30%, users will see a dark UI.

Because UI components sit on top of the theme surface, the change in UI treatment ensures there's sufficient contrast and legibility between the theme colors and the UI controls.

Originally, Tome's only theme preset was our Dark theme, which uses a single color scale optimized for darker UIs. With the launch of themes, we created a light mode UI to support the use of lighter colored themes. The light and dark UI modes are comprised of two elements:

: used mostly for UI elements (i.e., inputs, buttons, icons)

: used mostly for text and large surfaces (i.e. modals, dialogs)

Thanks for checking out custom color & themes! 🎨

We hope themes give you a more authentic, satisfying range of expression as you craft your narrative. We can't wait to see what you create.

Let us know what you think over email at 

The Magic Behind Tome's Color Algorithm and Themes

Since launching generative storytelling at the end of last year, we’ve been thrilled to see how millions of storytellers from all over the world have used Tome to share product designs, create lesson plans, close new customers, raise funding, and so much more.

We’ve heard that you want a limitless creation and sharing experience in Tome so you can continue to unleash your best ideas and work. So today, we’re excited to bring you an exciting series of improvements as part of our new Tome Pro plan.

For power creators, entrepreneurs, and teams

Our Pro plan is designed to give every type of storyteller an unconstrained creation and sharing experience in Tome. You’ll never have to worry about running out of AI compute credits, and you can add custom branding to make your story authentically yours.

With the Pro plan, you’ll get everything available in Tome today, plus:

 so you can always create and refine narratives with your AI-powered storytelling partner

 to create as many compelling stories as you need

 with dynamic logos and the ability to turn off Tome branding so your stories capture your brand and identity

 for those moments when your old-school client or professor asks for your work in an outdated format

 so you’ll never have to wait more than 3 hours for help from a real human

The Pro plan is available now on desktop. Simply go to your account settings, and then go to 

We custom-build our enterprise plans for large organizations that need advanced security and workspace controls, intelligent integrations with your data, and a dedicated customer success team. Get in touch with us if you’re interested in learning more.

Our free plan still gives individuals the same creation and sharing experience you’ve come to know and love in Tome. We’re committed to maintaining a robust free plan in Tome, so you’ll always be able to tell compelling stories.

Our Tome for Edu plan is still available, too. Sign up for a free account with a .edu address or proof of enrollment and get 5,000 AI compute credits for your workspace to generate and refine your tomes.

Tome Blog

The Magic Behind Tome's Color Algorithm and Themes

Meet Tome Pro: For limitless creation and sharing

Craft your next
great idea.

Tome Blog

The Magic Behind Tome's Color Algorithm and Themes

Meet Tome Pro: For limitless creation and sharing

Craft your nextgreat idea.

Craft your next
great idea.