Themes & Appearance
Palettes, light and dark, custom colors, and sharing themes as QR cards.
Finalist is meant to be a happy place, not another gray productivity grid. The theme controls live in Settings under Colors: pick your appearance, pick a palette, or build your own.
Appearance
Choose System, Light, or Dark. Your palette choice is remembered separately for light and dark, so you can run a bright swatch by day and a moodier one by night: switch the appearance, pick a swatch, and each mode keeps its own.
Palettes
Two built-in palette families ship with the app:
- Business Casual: four understated swatches for people who plan in public.
- Color Please: five adaptive swatches (Forest, Ocean, Sunset, Lavender, Mint) with colors tuned separately for light and dark mode.
Tap a swatch and the whole app retunes: every tab, and your widgets and Live Activities follow along.
If you've used Finalist since the 3.x days: the classic UI styles (Pocket Journal, Index Cards, Console) are on hiatus in 4.0 while the interface consolidates on the current design. Your old selection is remembered.
My Themes (Pro)
The My themes palette is where your own swatches live. Create one from scratch with the + button, or duplicate a system swatch and tweak it. Edit or delete your swatches from their long-press menu.
Share a theme as a QR card
Long-press one of your swatches and choose View QR Card: your theme becomes a scannable card you can send to anyone. They scan it (or tap the copied link) and import your exact colors with Import Theme. Half the fun of a custom theme is showing it off.
The other half of appearance
Colors are half the story; the layout is the other half. The Daily tab's Daybook and Broadsheet designs, section arrangement, and layout presets live on the Customize Your Daily page.
Related: Customize Your Daily · Widgets & Live Activities