Theme settings

Manifest concentrates its design controls in theme settings rather than scattering them across sections. Open them with the gear icon at the bottom of the theme editor sidebar. Everything on this page applies store-wide.

Color schemes

Manifest ships several color schemes. Each one defines a background, a foreground, button colors, and their paired text colors — six color settings in total, and every background is paired with a foreground so nothing can be configured into an unreadable state by accident.

Sections do not carry their own colors. Instead, each section picks which scheme it uses. This is what lets you alternate bands down a page without configuring color twelve separate times.

How to use it well: define two or three schemes and alternate them. A page using six different schemes reads as noise.

The scheme’s background renders edge to edge across the full width of the browser, while the content inside stays aligned to the page grid. You do not need to think about this — it is how every section behaves.

Typography

Two font pickers: one for headings, one for body text. Manifest loads the bold, italic, and bold-italic variants of your choices automatically, so emphasis inside a product description renders properly rather than being faked by the browser.

Only fonts from Shopify’s font library are available. This is deliberate — custom font files are one of the most common causes of a slow first paint, and the library is large enough that the constraint rarely bites.

Pairing advice: if you are unsure, use one family for both and let weight carry the hierarchy. A mismatched pair is more noticeable than a safe one.

Page width

A single setting controls the maximum content width for the entire theme. Two useful values:

• Narrow suits editorial catalogs — fewer products, longer copy, more photography.
• Wide suits larger catalogs where the collection grid is doing the work.

Sections that are meant to be full-bleed — heroes, large media — ignore this and span the viewport. That is intentional and not configurable per section.

Product cards

Card settings apply to every product card in the theme: collection grids, featured collection rails, search results, and recommendations. Configure them once.

Setting	What it does
Image ratio	Portrait, square, or the product image’s natural ratio
Hover behavior	Show the second product image on hover
Vendor	Show or hide the vendor line
Ratings	Show a review-app rating when one is present
Swatches	Show color swatches from your variant options
Quick add	Add to cart from the grid without opening the product
Badges	Sale and new-arrival badges

Turning on ratings does not create ratings. It surfaces them if a review app has supplied them.

Motion

Two controls, and they reach everything:

• Transition style — fade, rise, scale, or none. Applies to menus, tabs, disclosures, drawers, and slideshows.
• Interface speed — how fast those transitions run.

A third, separate setting controls scroll reveals: whether content animates in as it enters the viewport. It is separate because it is a different decision, and because some merchants want interface motion without entrance animation.

Choosing none gives you an immediate, unanimated theme. So does a visitor’s own reduced-motion preference — the theme honors that automatically and you do not need to configure anything for it.

Favicon and social sharing

Set the favicon in theme settings. For social sharing images, Shopify uses the image set on the individual page, product, or collection, falling back to a store-wide image you set in Online Store → Preferences. Manifest emits the Open Graph and Twitter card tags that consume them.

What is deliberately absent

There is no per-section spacing control, no per-section font size, and no per-section color picker. These were considered and left out. A theme that lets every section be tuned separately produces stores that look assembled rather than designed, and it makes updates far harder to reason about. The global settings above are the intended path.