Why This Is Useful
It’s nearly Christmas and I don’t know about you, but my org doesn’t feel remotely festive enough for the occasion.
So today we’re going to take a relatively standard looking Salesforce org and turn it into something your users would look at and think “that’s too much, I don’t want that, but thank you.”
Along the way you’ll actually learn how to override virtually all of Salesforce’s out of the box look and feel, which is genuinely useful the rest of the year too. The techniques are the same whether you’re doing something festive or applying real corporate branding.
1. Custom Themes And Branding
Start with what Salesforce actually supports, because you can get surprisingly far.
Setup → Themes and Branding → New Theme
You get to change:
1. Brand image – your logo in the header
2. Brand colour – which propagates through a lot of the UI
3. Link colour
4. Background image – the big one visually
5. Loading page colours
Set the brand colour to a Christmas red, drop in a suitably festive background image, and you’re most of the way there in about five minutes.
Note that custom themes apply org wide, and you can only have one active at a time. So this is an all-or-nothing decision, which is worth knowing before you commit.
2. Custom App Branding
For finer control, each Lightning App has its own branding.
Setup → App Manager → Edit → App Branding
Which means you can make the Sales app festive while leaving your integration user’s app alone. Better targeted than the org-wide theme, and a good compromise if not everybody wants snow.
3. Custom Lightning Page Templates
Here’s the one most people don’t know about: you can build your own Lightning page templates.
A custom template is an Aura component implementing lightning:availableForAllPageTypes, and it gives you complete control over the page’s structure and styling. Which means you can put whatever you like around the standard components, including falling snow, if you’re committed to the bit.
They show up as options in the App Builder template picker alongside the standard ones.
4. Injecting CSS Everywhere Else
For the bits none of the above reaches, you’re into CSS injection territory, which is exactly what I built the Salesforce CSS Injector for.
Drop the component on a page, add a Custom Metadata record with your CSS, and you can restyle standard Salesforce markup that has no supported customisation path.
Same warning as in that post: this is unsupported and a Salesforce release can break it. Which for a Christmas theme you’ll remove in January is a completely acceptable risk, and for permanent branding is something to think harder about.
5. Confetti, Obviously
You cannot have a festive org without the built-in confetti component. Add it to a Screen Flow and fire it when something good happens.
I’ve covered that in the confetti celebrations post, and there’s more in how to lay Easter eggs in your org if you want to keep going.
The Responsible Bit
Since I’ve just talked you into redecorating a production system, a few things.
Do it in a sandbox first. Obviously.
Have an undo plan. Note which theme was active before, keep a screenshot, and know exactly how to revert. Turning it off should take one minute, not an investigation.
Ask first. Genuinely. Your users’ opinion of surprise decorations may differ from yours, and some orgs have very good reasons for wanting a plain interface.
Check contrast and accessibility. A dark festive background with dark text is unusable for some people. This matters more than the joke does.
Set a reminder to remove it. An org that’s still festive in March looks like nobody’s paying attention.
Have a great Christmas, and enjoy your absurd org.
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Salesforce Development Books I Recommend
Advanced Apex Programming
Salesforce Lightning Platform Enterprise Architecture
Mastering Salesforce DevOps
Good Non-SF Specific Development Books:
Clean Code
Clean Architecture
