A survey's colors, border radius, spacing, and font aren't split between "widget defaults" and
"your overrides" — the Attributes tab is the single source
of truth for both your light palette and your dark palette. The widget only falls back to its own
built-in defaults in one narrow case: dark mode gets forced on a survey that never configured its
own dark palette at all, so a real (if generic) dark theme still renders instead of silently doing
nothing.
The three color roles (presets)
Rather than picking raw colors everywhere, every color in a survey is assigned to one of three
built-in roles — primary, secondary, and neutral — each with its own color plus a
matching "content" color used for text/icons on top of it. Out of the box (before you customize
anything in Attributes) they default to a generic purple/pink/near-black set; almost every survey
overrides at least primary to match its own brand.
Theme settings and color-role swatches on the Attributes tab.
Individual elements (buttons, the rating stars, etc.) reference one of these three roles rather
than a hard-coded color, so changing primary in Attributes updates every element that uses it at
once, in both your light and dark palettes.
Light vs. dark: what decides which one shows
Three things can determine whether an end user sees your light or dark palette, checked in this
order:
The embedding page's own resolved theme, if it explicitly tells the widget which one to
use. In practice this only happens inside the admin's own live preview, so it can mirror
whatever theme you're previewing against — a real embed on your website never does this.
"Follow system" — if you set the survey's theme mode to System, the widget watches the
visitor's OS/browser dark-mode preference and switches palettes live as it changes.
A fixed choice — otherwise, the survey is simply always light or always dark, based on
whether you configured a dark palette for it at all.
Theme mode options (Attributes tab)
System — follows the visitor's OS preference.
Light — always your light palette.
Dark — always your dark palette (falls back to a generic dark theme if you haven't
customized one).
Configuring an explicit dark palette is worth doing even if you mostly expect light-mode visitors —
without one, "Dark" mode or a system-dark visitor sees a generic fallback palette that won't match
your brand colors.