¶ Story Themes and Styling: Creating a Consistent Look and Feel in SAP Analytics Cloud
In today’s data-driven organizations, delivering insights through clear, engaging, and consistent visual storytelling is vital. SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) empowers users to create dynamic stories—interactive dashboards and reports—that communicate complex business data effectively. One of the key elements to maximize impact and user adoption is applying story themes and styling that maintain a consistent look and feel aligned with corporate branding and usability best practices.
This article explores how to leverage SAC’s theming and styling capabilities to build professional, visually cohesive stories that resonate with your audience.
Consistency in design across SAC stories ensures:
- Brand alignment: Reinforces company identity through colors, fonts, and logos.
- Improved usability: Users navigate and interpret reports faster with familiar layouts and visuals.
- Professional appearance: Enhances stakeholder confidence in the analytics outputs.
- Efficient development: Standardized themes reduce repetitive styling effort across multiple stories.
¶ Understanding Story Themes in SAP Analytics Cloud
Story themes in SAC are predefined or custom templates that define a set of visual styles applied globally to charts, tables, texts, and backgrounds within a story.
- Color palette: Defines primary, secondary, and accent colors for charts, backgrounds, and fonts.
- Fonts and typography: Sets default font types, sizes, weights, and styles.
- Widget styling: Controls default appearance of charts, tables, shapes, and text widgets.
- Page backgrounds: Sets consistent backgrounds for all story pages.
- Logo and header/footer: Incorporates corporate branding elements.
Using themes ensures that your entire story maintains a unified aesthetic without having to style each widget individually.
¶ How to Apply and Customize Themes in SAC
SAC offers several standard themes that cover common color schemes and font styles. For quick projects or proof of concepts, built-in themes provide a good starting point.
For full brand alignment, SAC allows you to create custom themes by:
- Defining your corporate color palette including primary, secondary, neutral, and highlight colors.
- Setting fonts consistent with corporate typography guidelines.
- Customizing widget styles to ensure charts, tables, and input controls reflect brand identity.
- Uploading logos to be consistently displayed in story headers or footers.
Custom themes can be saved and reused across multiple stories to maintain brand coherence.
- Themes are applied at the story level and can be switched or updated anytime.
- When you change a theme, all widgets update instantly based on the new styling rules.
- Use the theme editor in SAC to preview and tweak visual elements before publishing.
- Use a limited color palette aligned with brand colors.
- Apply colors meaningfully (e.g., red for negative trends, green for positive).
- Avoid excessive colors that distract or confuse the viewer.
¶ Typography and Readability
- Use clear, legible fonts with appropriate sizes for titles, labels, and data points.
- Maintain consistent font sizes and weights across story pages.
- Avoid overly decorative fonts that reduce readability.
¶ Layout and Spacing
- Align widgets neatly using SAC’s grid and snap features.
- Maintain sufficient white space to reduce clutter.
- Group related visuals logically for easier interpretation.
¶ Branding Elements
- Incorporate your company logo subtly, avoiding overpowering the data.
- Use consistent header and footer styles for navigation and context.
- Embed corporate imagery or background designs only if they don’t interfere with data clarity.
- Use hover tooltips and interactive elements styled consistently.
- Ensure accessibility by checking color contrast and font sizes.
- Test stories on different devices to verify styling integrity.
Effective use of story themes and styling in SAP Analytics Cloud transforms raw data into compelling, branded narratives that users trust and engage with. By applying consistent visual standards, organizations can strengthen their brand presence, improve analytical communication, and accelerate adoption of SAC across teams.
Mastering story themes is not just about aesthetics—it’s about creating a seamless experience that bridges data and decision-making through design.