Utilizing Themes to Further Modular Form Designs

Regardless of how a form element looks the functionality remains the same. Therefore, when building out a form’s the styling should be separated from the form’s definition. Themes allow for this separation of a form’s appearance from the individual form definition. Similarly, to the functionality of templates, a theme is associated to a form and continually pushes the styling rules to all the forms that are referencing that theme. Furthermore, by separating the style from the form creation we can empower marketing teams to ensure that branding is consistent across all content.

Themes allow marketing teams to take control of the appearance of the digital forms. As organizations already have a standard guideline on how their content should look, these guidelines can be mapped directly to each form element type in a theme. This also simplifies the process of form creation as content creators only need to specify which theme a form should use rather than having to know and specify every element to meet the guidelines.

Organizations with multiple brands can create a unique theme for each brand, streamlining the rules and simplifying the process to ensure the proper styling is met in each situation. Having individual themes also simplifies the process of changing a style. The creative team needs to create one change and it will be automatically cascaded to all the forms that are using the specified theme rather than having to make the change on every individual form.

Creating and maintaining themes are done with drop downs removing the need to write CSS, further empowering the creative to team to control the style definitions. The authoring tool also has a preview function that allows the creative team to be able to view how the styles will look and function without having to set the style live.

Separating the appearance of a form from the functionality simplifies the responsibilities for the different teams. Content authors can focus on what the form needs to do while the marketing team is able to control how the form looks. Leveraging themes also reduces the demand for IT by allowing those who are responsible for aspects of the form to be able to control those portions of a form.