CHROMA, sleek themes for Nintendo Switch

CHROMA is an NXTheme project that aims to (hopefully) bring sleek designs to your Switch interface, providing a collection of themes that share similar UI design criteria. The intent here was to turn one year's worth of accumulated knowledge in Switch theming into full-fledged and coherent theme packs. While I don't consider the end result anywhere near perfect, great attention has still been given to color consistency and details.

As of now, it comes in 8 layout variants for the home screen (more specifically the games row), and it's pre-bundled with a few color schemes.

Contributors are always welcome, so feel free to fork this repository if you want to implement additional color schemes. Excluding bug reports, I won't be taking any requests.

Important: set your console to dark mode before using CHROMA (System Settings > Themes > Basic Black)

Features

Layout variants (base layouts)

Layouts listed here use 1:1 game icons. I don't plan on implementing vertical icons.

• Default: slightly inspired by the PS5 layout, icons are rounded and the highlighted game appears as a card. This layout leaves enough room to put a custom background image.
• Default large icons: same as right above with larger icons.
• Default w/ sidebar for applet icons
• Compact rounded: rounded icons. When a game is highlighted, its label overlaps the game's image.
• Regular squared: big squared icons. The focus animation when a game is highlighted is similar to what can be seen in SteamOS' Big Picture Mode.
• Regular rounded: same as right above but icons are rounded.
• Cards: similar to the default layout, but the games row is symmetrically aligned with the highlighted card, and icons are squared.
• Cards alt rounded: another take to the cards layout, rounded elements and the game's label is below the game's icon.

Color schemes

• B&W (base color scheme)

• Terra: earthy colors inspired by Monokai: light green, brown and hints of pink.

• Terra Mint: less vibrant tones than Terra with grayish brown, mint green and hints of beige.

• Aqua: aquamarine and deep blue colors.

  • Aqua Breeze: alt version with gradients and improves overall color consistency.

• Murasaki: light purple with hints of beige and pale orange.

• Neo Famicom: gray tones and colored buttons inspired by the SNES console.

• Red Wine: scarlet tones with some gradients.

• (only home screen & player select) Famicom: wine red and beige colors, inspired by the Famicom console. Uses the default w/ sidebar layout.

Download on Themezer

• CHROMA default (B&W)
• CHROMA Neo Famicom Ed.
• CHROMA Terra Ed.
• CHROMA Terra Mint Ed.
• CHROMA Aqua Ed.
  • CHROMA Aqua Breeze Ed. (+ gradients & some fine-tuning)
• CHROMA Murasaki Ed.
• CHROMA Red Wine Ed.

Quick showcase

Theme editing

This repository contains the themes' source code as well as their assets. Before anything else, check out the documentation to learn more about editing layouts. Additionally, a wiki that explicits the specifics of those themes might be published at some point.

Now, please note that CHROMA involves very intricate layouts as they massively rely on animations and convenient re-use of pre-existing UI elements (which is often the case with my NXTheme releases). You will most likely have a hard time to tweak those themes without breaking something. Also, most colors are dynamically handled (through animations) so making color changes isn't as straightforward as editing hex values within the JSON files. In fact, you will absolutely need Layout Editor for most of the UI.

Credits would be greatly appreciated if you're planning to publicly share your edited theme.

Known issues

• In the sidebar layout, the games scrolling will behave weirdly if the sidebar is accessed through some particular ways. It doesn't affect the navigation that much and there's a chance you won't even notice. This issue actually arose in Unison R as well, and unfortunately I have no solution to prevent this behavior.

Changelog

The versioning is independent for each applet. Sorry for the mess.

Home screen

v1.1

• Fixed Atmosphere crashing when uninstalling a game
• +2 layouts: default large icons, cards alt rounded

Settings

v1.1

• New generalized layout
  • styled "Manage Software" tab

v1.0 - initial/shared release (all applets)

Credits

• Atmosphere icon in CHROMA Terra Edition by dh park
• Atmosphere icon in CHROMA Aqua Edition by Viktor Vorobyev
• Atmosphere icon in CHROMA Murasaki Edition by Cuputo
• Atmosphere icon in all other variants by u/Quat0rz
• Switch controller SVG in Neo Famicom's lockscreen by Chad Remsing
• Special thanks to LayoutDocs contributors