# Customizing appearance
The **Theme** tab within each variant allows you to control the visual style of your flow. From here, you can define or override your design system to ensure a consistent, branded experience for responders.
### Starter themes
Formsort provides a set of prebuilt **starter themes** that you’ll encounter when creating a new flow. These base themes serve as a great foundation for building and customizing your own themes.
***
### Base Themes and Local Styles
Styling is customized in the **Theme** tab, and edits don't change the base theme directly. Instead, you’re applying **variant-specific overrides** on top of the base theme. This allows for design flexibility across variants without affecting the core styling used elsewhere.
{% hint style="info" %}
:bulb:The base theme will remain unchanged unless you explicitly [publish](#publishing-themes) a new version of it.
{% endhint %}
### Publishing themes
**Publish a New Base Theme**
Once you’ve finalized styling in the **Theme** tab, you can save your changes as a new base theme:
1. Click in the **Gear wheel** in the corner of the toolbar.
2. Select **Save a copy to workspace**.
3. Enter a **New Theme Label**
4. Click **Save**.
**Update an Existing Theme**
Once a new workspace Theme has been saved, you can publish updates to it by:
1. Clicking the **Gear wheel** in the corner of the toolbar.
2. Select **Publish new version of theme**.
Your updated theme will then be available for use across other flows and variants in your workspace.
***
### Switching themes
To change the base theme of a variant:
1. Navigate to the **Theme** tab.
2. Click the **Theme name** in right corner of the toolbar.
3. Choose from your existing base themes or one of Formsort’s starter themes.
### Remove Local Styles
Since each variant can include local styling changes on top of the base theme, you may want to revert or remove these overrides.
To reset to a clean version of your base theme:
1. Open the **Switch theme** menu.
2. Select the base theme you'd like to use (this can be the same one currently applied).
3. Enable the **Remove local styles** option.
4. Click **Switch**.
This will discard any variant-specific styling changes and return the flow to the default look of the selected base theme.
