MATLAB Theming

Style MATLAB charts with color palettes and — for uifigure apps — apply the R2025a Theme API for brand colors, dark mode, and component styling.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• Setting colororder for chart series colors (any context)
• Choosing or importing a color palette for plots
• Organizing brand colors into a reusable struct
• Applying a custom colormap for continuous data
• Implementing dark mode with fliplightness() (uifigure)
• Wiring ThemeChangedFcn to react to OS/user theme changes (uifigure)
• Using uistyle for conditional formatting in tables/trees (uifigure)
• Importing an external color scheme (Material Design, Adobe Color, Tailwind)

When NOT to Use This Skill

• Choosing chart types or building charts from scratch (use matlab-build-chart)
• Building a full app layout (use matlab-build-app — it invokes this skill for theming sub-steps)
• Setting colors on individual plot elements as a one-off (just use the Color property directly)
• Non-MATLAB styling (CSS, HTML themes for web apps)

Critical Rules

Universal (all contexts)

• MUST centralize brand/palette colors in a struct — never scatter RGB values
• ALWAYS use colororder() for categorical chart series colors
• ALWAYS use colormap() for continuous scalar-mapped colors
• NEVER confuse colororder (categorical series) with colormap (continuous gradient)

Additional rules for uifigure apps (R2025a Theme API)

• MUST use R2025a Theme API — do NOT manually set figure background or standard component colors
• MUST use fliplightness() to derive dark variants unless explicitly designing custom dark colors
• NEVER set a component's color explicitly unless branding requires it — breaks theme adaptation
• ALWAYS use the semantic token vocabulary defined below for cross-path consistency

Semantic Token Vocabulary

Both MATLAB and web implementations map to these common tokens. When importing an external color scheme, map its colors to these tokens once.

MATLAB note: Surface/text colors (--bg-primary, --text-primary in CSS) are NOT in the MATLAB theme struct. The R2025a Theme API handles those automatically. Only define brand/custom colors.

Quick Start

Color palettes for any figure

colors = [0 0.447 0.741; 0.85 0.33 0.10; 0.93 0.69 0.13; ...
          0.49 0.18 0.56; 0.47 0.67 0.19; 0.30 0.75 0.93];
colororder(ax, colors);
% All series in this axes now cycle through these colors

Theme struct for uifigure apps (R2025a)

function theme = createTheme(mode)
    arguments
        mode string {mustBeMember(mode, ["light", "dark"])} = "light"
    end
    theme.primary = [0 0.447 0.741];    % MATLAB blue
    theme.onPrimary = [1 1 1];
    theme.error = [0.83 0.18 0.18];
    theme.success = [0.22 0.56 0.24];
    theme.border = [0.88 0.88 0.88];
    theme.plotColors = [0 0.447 0.741; 0.85 0.33 0.10; 0.93 0.69 0.13; ...
                        0.49 0.18 0.56; 0.47 0.67 0.19; 0.30 0.75 0.93; 0.64 0.08 0.18];
    if mode == "dark"
        theme.primary = fliplightness(theme.primary);
        theme.plotColors = fliplightness(theme.plotColors);
    end
end

Wiring to a figure:

fig.ThemeChangedFcn = @(src, ~) applyTheme(src, ax);

function applyTheme(fig, ax)
    theme = createTheme(fig.Theme.BaseColorStyle);
    colororder(ax, theme.plotColors);
end

Light/Dark Strategy

1. Don't set figure background, standard component bg/text — Theme API handles it automatically
2. Do set brand colors (primary buttons, accent labels, status indicators) via theme struct
3. Use ThemeChangedFcn to swap brand colors when OS/user toggles dark mode
4. Use fliplightness() to auto-derive dark brand colors from light definitions
5. Leave ColorMode = "auto" on components wherever possible

What breaks automatic theming — setting any color explicitly switches ColorMode to "manual":

btn.BackgroundColor = [0.2 0.4 0.8];  % Now manual — won't adapt to theme
btn.BackgroundColorMode = "auto";       % Restore theme control

Color Types in MATLAB

• colororder = categorical (series A, B, C get distinct colors)
• colormap = continuous (scalar values mapped to gradient)
• Don't confuse them — they serve different purposes

Importing External Color Schemes

Workflow

1. Pick a scheme from Material Design, Adobe Color, Tailwind, etc.
2. Extract 5-7 key colors: primary, secondary, error, success, warning, border + 5-7 chart series colors
3. Convert hex to [R G B] normalized 0-1: rgb = sscanf(hex(2:end), '%2x', 3)' / 255
4. Map to theme struct fields: theme.primary, theme.secondary, etc.
5. Test both modes: verify fliplightness() produces acceptable dark variants; override manually if not
6. Apply via applyBrandColors: the function reads the struct and sets tagged components

See references/external-schemes.md for complete Material Design, Adobe Color, and Tailwind import examples.

Implementation Checklist

Styling

• Brand colors centralized in createTheme struct
• fliplightness() used for dark variants
• Branded components tagged for findall lookup
• ThemeChangedFcn wired to re-apply brand colors
• colororder set from theme.plotColors
• No explicit colors on auto-themed components

Troubleshooting

References

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