Themes, logo & the design shell¶

A theme controls the report's colours, fonts and visual styling; the layout shell (nav side, logo, canvas) is controlled by flags. Together they let you match any house style.

Built-in themes¶

pbigen themes           # midnight | slate | aurora

pbigen.generate(..., theme="midnight")   # deep indigo sidebar, blue/teal data colours
pbigen.generate(..., theme="slate")      # neutral slate, red accent
pbigen.generate(..., theme="aurora")     # deep green sidebar, green/blue data colours

Each is a polished executive look: light canvas, white raised cards with coloured KPI accent bars, big numbers, soft shadows, refined type, tidy legends.

Bring your own theme¶

Point --theme (CLI) or theme= (Python) at any standard Power BI theme JSON:

pbigen generate ... --theme ./corporate-theme.json

pbigen.generate(..., theme="./corporate-theme.json")

The theme is copied into the report's registered resources (<name>.Report/StaticResources/…), so it travels with the project. Files with a UTF-8 BOM (common from the gallery / Windows) load fine.

Where to get themes: the Power BI Community Theme Gallery (click Download), Microsoft's samples repo, or export the one applied in a report from Power BI Desktop → View → Themes → Save current theme.

The two convenience keys: `sidebarColor` / `accentColor`¶

pbigen reads two optional keys to colour the navigation sidebar; both are stripped before the theme file is written, so it stays a valid Power BI theme:

{
  "name": "Corporate",
  "sidebarColor": "#1B1F3B",
  "accentColor": "#FFFFFF",
  "dataColors": ["#4C6FFF", "#22C1C3", "..."],
  "visualStyles": { "...": {} }
}

If sidebarColor is absent, pbigen derives a cohesive nav colour from the theme's own dark brand colour (foreground/maximum), falling back to a dark indigo.
Set sidebarColor (and optionally accentColor) explicitly to control the nav exactly.

A theme only carries colours/fonts/visual styles — not the sidebar/background of some other report. To match a specific nav colour, set sidebarColor in the theme JSON.

Layout shell — nav side, logo, canvas¶

pbigen generate ... --nav right                 # sidebar on the right (default: left)
pbigen generate ... --logo ./assets/logo.png    # a logo image in the nav sidebar

--nav left|right mirrors the whole shell (sidebar, filters, logo, notes).
--logo copies the image into the report's registered resources and binds it as an image visual; it replaces the text brand strip. If the path doesn't exist, pbigen warns and skips it.

Reuse a whole report's design — template packs¶

A theme only carries colours, fonts and visual-style defaults. To reuse a report's entire look — canvas, background, sidebar and header chrome, logo, title font and per-visual formatting — compile it into a template pack:

pbigen template build their_report.pbix --out brand_pack
pbigen generate --source bigquery --set project=P dataset=D table=T --template brand_pack --out out

See Template packs. (The older pbigen extract-template still works and extracts only the theme + images.)

What the layout always gives you¶

In pbigen's own shell (no template), every page gets: a navigation sidebar (brand/logo, stacked filters, a "how to use this report" note), a light canvas, a header with the page title and its headline question, a KPI band with coloured accent bars and period-over-period deltas, and a 12-column story grid (hero + side, halves, thirds, full width). The theme decides how it looks; the shell flags decide where the nav and logo go.