Changing theme colors automatically

[Taynara Menezes]

Hello people
Are there any automatic ways, through assets, to change an artboard or file from light to dark theme?
I saw that with the Spectrum plugin this is very simple to do, but it can only be done in the colors predefined by Adobe's Design System, I can't manipulate them.
Also if there was a way for me to take the colors from one file and put it in another and it automatically takes those colors, does anyone know any way to do this?
I would like to improve this work for my team.

[Spas K.]

Well, technically, it would be hard for the software to know which colors you want to change and where to get them from. The Spectrum plugin has a lot of pre-coded and pre-defined values behind it.

I think the recoloring of elements in Xd is probably the easiest task to do. There is a plugin called Recolor, which makes it a bit more clear and manageable, but I haven't had the need to use it.

If you select all the elements you want to recolor and add their colors to assets, you can right click on the said colors in the assets panel and edit them. The changes are applied to all the elements of the specific color. Normally interfaces don't (or shouldn't) use more than 5-6 colors, so it doesn't sound like such a hassle.

[Taynara Menezes]

Thank you for your suggestion. But what I'm talking about more specifically is not about the amount of colors, but the amount of artboards and components that I will have to change. When I make a prototype of an entire functionality in the light theme, I would like to just press a button and change everything to dark than having to go from layer to layer changing the colors. I would like to know something that could automate this, if I already have the predefined colors. I imagined that when I had colors saved as assets with a certain Name, and pulled other assets from other files, they would be automatically replaced, but currently, they are just added.

[Spas K. · Accepted solution]

You don't have to go from layer to layer. You just need to change the colors in the assets panel. All layers using that color will be affected.

I understand you want to do it with 2 clicks, but it's a bit too much to ask at this point I think 🙂

Maybe someone can make a plugin for that specific workflow in the future.

I made a quick video showing how I do these things. It doesn't matter if it's 2 artboards or 50, as long as your colors are consistent. I think 2-3 minutes to quickly replace one set of colors with another isn't a big deal.

P.S. Components (these dropdown fields) are not affected, because they are linked.

If you make them local components, which takes one click, they will change too. Just forgot to do that 🙂