Update Standard Branding Elements | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this unit, you will be able to:

• Navigate and make edits to the answers-variables.scss file
• Identify the components or features that a pre-defined variable controls
• Recall best practices for updating standard branding elements

Overview

The Theme uses CSS and SASS to customize frontend experiences. CSS variables gives you the flexibility to use variables to define things like colors, fonts, borders, and more in one place to use it across several CSS rules. Refer to the Introduction to CSS  module if you need more practice with CSS.

The files we’ll be handling can be found under static > scss.

The Answers Variables File

We store many commonly used variables in the answers variables file (found at static/scss/answers-variables.scss), where we can define the value of multiple CSS properties without having to update the CSS of all sections that should use that variable. See the Standard Branding Elements reference doc for the default version of file found in the Theme. We’ll also walk through common variables to update and what changes would look like.

For example, if you want to update the primary text color from black to red, you can update the value of one variable --yxt-color-text-primary instead of having to individually target each text class (e.g., navigation text, description text, result bar text). You will learn more about customizing individual elements in the next unit.

If you are curious about which elements are controlled by which variable, you can always inspect an element within live preview.

Best Practices

Variable Naming Convention

Variables prefixed with yxt are variables used in the Search UI SDK library (and can also be referenced in the Theme), while those prefixed with hh are variables defined only in the Theme. If you want to add new variables in your variables files, we recommend you prefix them with something like hh to ensure there are no conflicts with other CSS variables your customer may be setting.

Brand-Specific Colors

You’ll want to inspect a customer’s website to ensure you’re adhering to their styles as much as possible. Customers might even have a style guide that will give you the specific colors and other styles to apply. For example, we can pull the Yext blue color by inspecting the CTA on the homepage, and grabbing the value #0f70f0 to use as our --yxt-color-brand-primary.

Contrast Checker

For the --yxt-color-brand-primary and --yxt-color-text-primary, we recommend pulling colors that have enough contrast against your chosen background color for accessibility purposes. You can use a tool like  WebAim’s Contrast Checker to verify if this passes sufficient contrast. Typically, we aim for a contrast above 7:1 to pass all the tests.