Themes restyle the visual chrome of your site — typography, borders, card shapes, layout rhythm. They compose with your content focus and color scheme: the same data and the same accent color render very differently depending on the theme you pick. Themes change look, not content; you can switch any time without losing data.
The four themes
Pick from the Theme card in the website builder (web) or in Site Settings (iOS). Each theme has its own curated set of font pairings and an opinionated visual treatment.
Default
The standard FacultyDex look. Clean modern academic typography, soft rounded cards, balanced spacing. The safest pick when you want your content to lead and the chrome to recede.
Magazine
Editorial print feel. Italic serif display headings, hairline rules between sections instead of card borders, generous gutters, small-caps nav captions. On wider viewports the homepage flows into a two-column masonry layout — sections pack top-to-bottom in each column without the row-alignment gaps a regular grid would create. Best paired with a warm or muted color scheme.
Floating
Soft, friendly, card-driven. Large rounded corners, layered shadows instead of borders, fully rounded social pills, blurred nav. The homepage uses the same two-column masonry as Magazine but with tighter gutters and rounded card edges. Hero renders as a centered intro card with a circular portrait — a more "welcome" look than the full-bleed Default hero.
Brutalist academic
Monospace fonts everywhere, hard 2px borders, no shadows, uppercase section headings, slash-delimited metadata, square pills. The Hero is a dedicated print-letterhead variant — title in all-caps, thick primary-color bars top and bottom, bio rendered as a blockquote with a left rule. High contrast, opinionated, distinctive. Best paired with a bold high-contrast color scheme.
Theme vs. content focus vs. color scheme
These three are independent levers and you can mix them freely:
- Theme — visual chrome (this article). Magazine / Floating / Brutalist / Default.
- Content focus — which sections lead your homepage and how they're ordered. See Content focus.
- Color scheme — primary, accent, background. See Color schemes.
Each theme has its own fonts
When you switch themes, the font picker updates to show only pairings that fit that theme. Magazine offers serif-led pairings (Newsreader, Playfair, Fraunces). Brutalist offers monospace stacks (JetBrains Mono, IBM Plex, Space Mono). Floating leans rounded sans (Manrope, Syne, Outfit). Default has the broadest mix.
Your font pairing choice persists per-theme. Switching themes will snap to that theme's default pairing if your previous pick isn't in the new theme's list.
What changes when you switch themes
Visible changes: typography, card border style, card shadow, section heading style, Hero layout (each theme has its own Hero variant), pill and badge styling, nav link style, homepage layout (single column vs. two-column masonry).
Unchanged: your content, your color scheme, your content focus, your published URL. The change applies to your draft immediately. Your live site doesn't update until you republish.
Picking on iOS
On iOS, the onboarding flow asks you to pick a theme (not a content focus — content focus is auto-set to the right default for your site type). After onboarding, you can change either in Site Settings.