How to Make and Share a Theme Other People Will Actually Use

Updated: August 2, 2026 · 6-minute read

Written and maintained by the Chroma AI team at ComfortOne Co., Ltd. — we build the extension this guide describes, and we update these pages as the interfaces change.

Making a theme for yourself is easy — you tune it until you like it and you're done. Making one other people will keep is a different exercise, because you're designing for screens, habits and tastes you can't see. This guide is about that gap: what separates a theme people apply and abandon from one they actually keep.

Designing for yourself vs. designing for others

Three assumptions quietly break the moment someone else applies your theme:

• Screen size. Your background is framed perfectly on your monitor. On a 13-inch laptop it may be cropped to an unrecognisable close-up; on an ultrawide it may be stretched thin. Compositions with a clear centre of interest and forgiving edges survive this; ones that depend on precise framing don't.
• Light or dark mode. You built it in one; half your audience uses the other. A theme tuned for a dark interface can be unreadable over a light one.
• What they're doing. You may mostly write short prompts. Someone else is reading 800-word responses full of code. Your theme has to hold up in the harder case.

The practical fix for all three: test before sharing. Resize your browser window narrow and wide. Open a long conversation with code blocks. Toggle the platform's light/dark setting. Anything that survives that is genuinely shareable.

What makes a theme worth keeping

1. Readable first. The single most common reason a theme is applied and then removed within a minute is text that's hard to read. Beauty buys you a click; legibility buys you a keeper.
2. Calm in the middle. Conversation text runs down the centre. Whatever your image does elsewhere, the middle should be quiet.
3. One coherent mood. The best themes read as a single idea — "late-night terminal," "misty morning," "warm paper." A background and an accent colour that clearly belong together beat a beautiful image with a random accent.
4. Restraint with motion. Animated backgrounds are striking in a preview and exhausting to work in when the motion is fast. Slow, ambient movement is the version people keep.
5. Sensible glass settings. You're sharing your blur and opacity too. A setting that looks dramatic on your machine may be unreadable on a brighter screen — err slightly toward safety.

The part people skip: image licensing

This matters more than most creators realise. Using an image privately is one thing; sharing it publishes it, and that's a different legal question.

Screenshots from films, anime, games, and other artists' illustrations are copyrighted. Sharing them isn't yours to do, regardless of how the theme is credited, and rights holders in some categories are notably active about enforcement. Themes that infringe get removed when reported — which is a bad outcome for you if people were using yours.

What's safe to share:

• Your own photography or artwork — unambiguously yours, and often more distinctive than stock.
• Properly licensed stock from libraries such as Unsplash, Pexels or Pixabay. Check the individual licence, and avoid images that contain recognisable characters, logos or branding even when the image itself is free.
• Images you generated yourself. If you're chasing a particular aesthetic, prompt for the mood rather than the property — "anime-style dusk landscape, no characters, no logos" gets you the feeling without borrowing someone's IP.

A simple test before uploading: could someone recognise a specific character, brand, or artist's work in this image? If yes, keep it for personal use rather than sharing it.

Thumbnails and naming

In a gallery, your theme is a small image and a short name. Both do real work.

• The thumbnail should show the theme, not just the wallpaper. A preview that includes the interface — glass panels, accent colour — tells people what they're actually getting.
• Name it for the mood, not the file. "Midnight Harbour" tells someone what they're applying. "bg_final_v3" doesn't. Short, evocative names get more clicks than descriptive ones.
• Avoid naming it after a franchise. Besides the licensing issue, it sets an expectation you can't fulfil and can imply an association that doesn't exist.
• Tags should describe what it looks like — colours, mood, subject. Think about the words someone would search when they want the feeling you made.

How sharing works

1. Build the theme in the extension sidebar — background, colours, glass settings.
2. Test it at different window widths and with a long conversation open.
3. Open the upload panel from the bottom of the sidebar.
4. Give it a name, an optional description, and tags. A one-line description of the mood helps more than a feature list.
5. Publish. It appears in the gallery where anyone can apply it in one click, and you can see how many people have.

You keep control afterwards: shared themes can be reviewed and deleted from your account page at any time. Uploading is a Pro feature; browsing the gallery is free for everyone.

After you share it

A theme that gets applied a lot usually has an obvious quality — it's calm, it's readable, and the preview honestly represents it. If yours isn't getting picked up, the most common causes are a thumbnail that doesn't show the interface, a name nobody can visualise, or a background that looks great in preview but fails the readability test.

It's also worth revisiting old themes. Interfaces change over time, and a theme built against an older layout may not sit as well as it once did. Re-testing occasionally and updating what you've shared is the difference between a gallery entry and something people actually rely on.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

• Best ChatGPT backgrounds — what actually works
• What is glassmorphism?
• How to change your ChatGPT background
• Set up an AI chat workspace for all-day use