Themes
Create beautiful and customized visualizations to tell your story with real-time social content
Christine Chalk avatar
Written by Christine Chalk
Updated over a week ago

Create a Theme

Click on "Themes" on the left sidebar of your Account Dashboard. Here you can access and edit any of your existing themes, or start fresh to create a new one.

  • Isolated: show a single post at a time, with a customized background, header, and sponsor or company logo

  • Lower Third: keyable display optimized for broadcast, live streams, and OTT; text is responsive to fit into the lower third area of the screen

  • Lower Third Scroll: similar to the lower third, except text will not shrink to fit the space. Instead, text will scroll up and down, making this display optimized for viewers on second screens.

  • Cinematic: fullscreen display, optimized for media

  • Stories: built specifically for vertical video from Snapchat or Instagram Stories

  • Ticker: keyable, text-only display optimized for broadcast, live streams, and OTT

  • Grid: multi-post display optimized for media posts; includes the option to select an even grid or a mosaic with differently sized tiles

  • Waterfall: multi-post display built to display media and text

  • Carousel: a multi-post display showing social content in a vertical or horizontal carousel

  • Mural: a multi-post display that will stitch together all of your social content into one cohesive mural

Customize your Theme

STEP 1: THEME INFO

Start by titling your Theme, to make sure your Theme is easy to search and locate.

The max post count controls how many posts will cycle through on your programming when using this Theme. For example, if your max post count is 30, your Theme will only show the 30 most recently featured posts.

Select a preview tagboard to build your Theme with your own featured content.

STEP 2: LAYOUT (GRID ONLY)

Choose between a standard grid (where all posts are the same size) or an advanced grid (a mosaic with differently sized tiles). You can also customize the number of rows and columns that will work best on your screen.

STEP 3: STYLES 

General

Here's where you can design your Theme step-by-step, to embody your brand and fit your guidelines. 

In the General tab, customize your font and background. You can change your background to a solid color using the color picker,  select a graphic from your Media Library, or search for a GIF, powered by GIPHY. 

Note: your background image should match the screen ratio of the screen you plan to use for your programming. For example, if your screen is a standard 16:9, your background graphic should be created with the same 16:9 ratio. You can edit your assets in your Media Library, and adjust the preview size at the top of the Theme Builder.

If you're using Lower Third or Lower Third Scroll, you can also update the chroma key color. By default, the hex code is #0f0.

Call to Action

You can organize the header on your Theme by selecting a CTA template. This enables you to include a call to action, a logo of your choice, and the social network icons. 

Post

Customize how your social posts are displayed by selecting a post color theme, light or dark. Depending on the Theme layout you've chosen, you may also have options to show or hide media captions, or use sharp or rounded corners. 

Advanced (Grid and Waterfall only)

Under the Advanced tab, control the gutter size, the spacing between your rows and columns.

You also have the option to enable Interactive Mode on grid or waterfall. In this mode, animations will not autoplay. Instead, the display will be static and you will be able to interact with the posts on your connected screen.

STEP 4: ANIMATION

Choose how your posts are animated on your display. You can set the cycle speed in this section as well.

STEP 5 (OPTIONAL): CSS

If you need a visualization that is more custom than the options allow for in the Theme Builder, the Tagboard team is happy to help! Visualizations must follow the social network redisplay requirements; however, outside of those rules, the sky's the limit with design. Reach out to your dedicated Client Success Manager to get started!

If you've already worked with our team to build custom visualizations, the CSS tab on the left sidebar of the builder is where you can apply those custom Snippets to your Theme.

Click on 'add snippets' to view the dropdown menu that has been customized just for you. You'll see a list of every custom design the Tagboard team has already built out for you. Select the custom look you want to apply to your Theme.

When you add a Snippet, you are applying custom code to that visualization. Snippets can be used to customize every type of Smart Panel, as well as Themes and Graphics. If you are adding a Snippet to a Theme, be sure to add a Snippet that was built for that specific type of Theme in order for the CSS to apply properly. One important thing to note: you also have the ability to remove a Snippet, which will remove custom code from that visualization.

STEP 6: SAVE

Click save in the upper right corner, and you're ready to go! Next step, it's time to curate content!

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