The Appearance tab of your profile. Everything here is yours alone and none of it changes what you can see or do.
Themes
Four, two light and two dark.
| Theme | Mode |
|---|---|
| Arctic Cloud | Light |
| Classic Slate | Light |
| Pro Slate | Dark |
| Midnight Pro | Dark |
The pairs are not the same theme lightened or darkened. They differ in contrast and in how much separation there is between surfaces, so it is worth trying both on each side rather than assuming light and dark are the only choice you are making.
There is also a keyboard shortcut for flipping between light and dark, which is more useful than it sounds if you work into the evening.
Accent colour
A list of accents, from restrained greens through to purples and pinks.
Your organisation may have locked this, in which case you will see a note saying so rather than a picker. That is brand consistency rather than a fault, and it is the correct behaviour for a company that has decided what its product looks like.
Where it is not locked, the accent appears in a deliberately small number of places: the active item, primary buttons, a handful of highlights. NearSync is a monochrome interface with one colour moment, which is why an accent you would find loud on a whole page is fine here.
One exception is worth knowing. The four performance areas on Home have their own fixed colour families and ignore your accent entirely. Tinting all four the same colour would turn a chart into decoration.
Fonts
Three typeface pairings, applied to the whole application.
This is an accessibility setting rather than a style one, and it is under-used. If text feels cramped, or you find yourself leaning in, try the other two before reaching for browser zoom. The pairings genuinely differ in how open the letterforms are and how well they hold at small sizes, and one of them will suit your eyes better than the others.
There is no wrong answer and nobody else is affected.
Sidebar mode and rail colour
Both live here and both are covered properly in the piece on making the sidebar yours: three modes, a side of the screen, and coloured or monochrome bands.
What the accent is used for
Worth knowing so the choice is informed rather than arbitrary.
The accent appears on the active navigation item, primary buttons, focus rings, a small number of highlights, and the progress arcs on Home. That is close to the whole list.
It deliberately does not appear as a background fill on large surfaces, which is why a colour that would be overwhelming across a whole page is comfortable here. If an accent looks wrong in the picker, try it for an hour before rejecting it: the swatch is a much larger area of colour than you will actually see.
Trying a theme properly
Themes look different in a screenshot from how they feel after four hours, so the useful test is not a glance.
Give one a full working day before deciding. First impressions favour the more contrasty option, and long use frequently favours the calmer one.
Judge it on the screen you use most, not on Home. Home is deliberately the most composed screen in the product; the honest test is a dense table or a long feed.
Change one thing at a time. Switching theme, accent and font together tells you nothing about which one you actually reacted to.
What none of this touches
Your access. No theme reveals or hides a hub.
Anybody else's screen. These are personal preferences, stored against your profile, and they follow you between devices rather than living in one browser.
The product's structure. Nothing here moves anything. If you cannot find a screen, the answer is in permissions or the search box, not in appearance.
It follows you
Every setting here is stored against your profile rather than in the browser, so a theme chosen on your laptop is the theme you get on a different machine.
That is worth knowing in reverse too: changing it on a shared or demo machine changes it for you everywhere, not just there.
The one thing an organisation can override
Only the accent, and only when a tenant has committed to a brand colour.
Everything else on this tab is yours regardless of what your organisation has configured. There is no administrator setting that forces a theme, a font or a sidebar mode on somebody, deliberately: those are accessibility choices as often as they are aesthetic ones, and taking them away from people costs more than a consistent screenshot is worth.
Density, contrast and long days
Two practical observations from people who use this all day.
Dark is not automatically easier. In a bright office, a dark theme with low contrast is harder to read than a light one, not easier. Match the theme to the room rather than to a preference you formed somewhere else.
Contrast matters more than colour. If you are tired at four in the afternoon, the useful change is usually the higher-contrast theme on the side you already prefer, not switching sides.
Accessibility beyond the font
Three things worth knowing if the defaults do not suit you.
The higher-contrast themes are genuinely different, not just darker or lighter, and they are the first thing to try if text feels indistinct.
Reduced motion is respected. If your system asks for less animation, the product honours it rather than overriding it.
Zoom works normally. Nothing here is laid out so tightly that browser zoom breaks it, so combining a larger font pairing with a modest zoom is a legitimate setup.
A reasonable approach
Set a theme on day one so the product feels like yours. Leave the accent alone unless it grates. Try the fonts once, deliberately, and then forget all of it.
Time spent tuning appearance past the first week is time not spent on the work, and the settings are still there whenever something starts to annoy you.
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