Theme
themes, site theme, brand theme, theme selectDefinitions
A complete set of values applied to a whole surface at once — every token, for every component — so that the same markup reads as a different place: this site's nine (System, Lyra, Nord, Dracula, Catppuccin, Carnival, Reef, Broadsheet, Manifest), each a CSS file keyed by data-theme
The CSS Zen Garden sense, and the one this repository means by the word: the HTML never changes, the stylesheet does. A theme here sets radius, fonts, label casing and the OKLCH palette; a component knows nothing about which one is active. Selected by the reader, persisted in localStorage, and the reason "no hardcoded colors" is a rule rather than advice.
In the CWDS Figma file and its exports, a brand mode — Themeless as the default, one brand mode (Skyrizi) over it — and the stylesheet each produces
Whole-surface, like the first sense, but the axis is brand, not reader's taste: the values a brand overrides are the brand instance, and the mode switch is how Figma shows one component in two brands. The glossary keeps this under themeless and brand instance.
In Nova and Helium, a named set of component-scoped tokens for one component — the "theme" an author picks from a select in AEM — and in older team usage, a theme variant of a component
When the difference is purely visual, this maps to a treatment in the design-system vocabulary: component-scoped styling selected per instance. The word survived because Helium's plugin and the AEM dialog both say theme; read it as treatment when the scope is one component and as one of the first two senses when the scope is a page or a brand. The team has used theme and variant ambiguously in the past for exactly this case, which is what the new word is for.
The September 23 working vocabulary uses mode for a whole-system variation such as light/dark and avoids theme because of these existing meanings. Existing APIs keep their names.
Scope is what decides the word. A page or a brand: theme. One component, one instance, one look: treatment. Anything that changes what the component does: variant. Say which of the three before the meeting, not after.