Quick Reference: Themes and the main colour palette

When building reports and dashboards in Amazon QuickSight, you can use Themes to align with brand palettes, adjust colour contrast to improve accessibility or just create more impactful visualisations.

If you’re new to QuickSight themes, there are 6 main colours that can be configured:

  • Primary background
  • Primary foreground
  • Secondary background
  • Secondary foreground
  • Accent
  • Accent foreground

A picture can be worth a thousand words when trying to understand the effect of configuring the colour palette, so I’ve created the following analysis to help illustrate where these colours apply when creating an analysis, or dashboard, in QuickSight:

Referring to this analysis, you can see that:

  • Primary colours apply to individual visuals
  • Secondary colours apply to the sheet and its controls
    • Secondary foreground also applies to any visual vertical scroll bars (with a degree of transparency)
  • Accent applies to narration customisations (see EMEA and AMER in the narrative)
    • Accent also applies to chart scroll bars (with a degree of transparency)

In addition, the Accent colours are also applied to the authoring experience. For example when editing narratives as shown below:

  • Accent foreground for text that is overlaid on a background of Accent
  • Accent for text when not overlaid

image

I hope this helps you when configuring the colour palettes of custom themes in QuickSight and leads to even more beautiful data visualisations.

Many Thanks,
Andrew

1 Like

Hi @abacon good to learn new things, yes we are doing all the color formatting for each section separately so it always time consuming to do that. We can use this concept to implement in our dashboard so that we can save our lot of time.

**Please keep posting these type of article so that as a QuickSight user we implement it in our dashboard developement.

Thanks & Regards
Biswajit Dash

2 Likes

Thanks for sharing this @Biswajit_1993! Glad @abacon’s article is helping you and your team!

1 Like

@abacon Hello I have a question, is it possible to change the theme of quicksight home page?


I do not know like the bar instead of this color like red? change the background colors?

thank you

Hi @remba87

No this not possible in the native console. I also don’t believe you can change this in the embedded version, but I’m not 100% sure on that.