Brand recipes

Prerequisites

• Node.js 22+
• @themvora/cli installed (globally, locally, or via npx)

A brand recipe is a brand-inspired starting point: a documented reference colour, pinned as an anchor, and a full theme derived from it.

themvora list brands
themvora generate --brand apple

Brand recipes are brand-inspired, not official. They are Themvora's own interpretations, generated by Themvora's own engine. They are not published, reviewed, or endorsed by the companies named, and using one does not make your product affiliated with them. Check the brand's own guidelines before shipping anything that imitates their identity.

What a recipe records, and what Themvora derives

This distinction is the whole point of the feature, so it is worth being exact.

Recorded — the documented input. Each recipe names one publicly documented reference and one anchor colour taken from it. That is the only brand-specific data Themvora stores:

apple
  reference      Apple · official-guidelines
                 https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/color
                 design system: yes · light/dark: yes
  anchor         light primary  #007aff  System Blue
  provenance     approximate

Derived — Themvora's own output. Everything else in the theme is produced by the generator from that anchor: the surfaces, borders, muted and accent roles, the dark-mode counterparts, and the contrast repair. None of it is copied from the brand's site or design system, and none of it is claimed to be theirs.

themvora explain shows both halves side by side, and is the way to check what a recipe actually pins:

themvora explain --brand apple

The provenance field states how faithful the recipe is. Every shipped brand is approximate: the anchor is documented, the rest is derived.

The five recipes

Browse them with the colours applied on the brand preset gallery.

Using a recipe

# Generate a file
themvora generate --brand apple --output theme.json

# Start a project on it
themvora init my-app --framework react --brand apple

# Add it to an existing project's registry
themvora add brand github

There is no per-brand shorthand

themvora generate --apple      # ✗ not shipped

The shorthand form does not exist, and the docs do not show it. A brand is named with --brand <id>, like every other registry value, because that is the only spelling the parser accepts — and because a flag per brand would be a second registry in the command surface.

Discovering the ids

themvora list brands            # a table, with character, style and provenance
themvora list brands --json     # the full entries
themvora list brands --ids      # just the identifiers, one per line

Recipes are not scraped

A recipe is authored data in the Themvora repository, reviewed like any other source file. The CLI never fetches a brand's website, never reads their CSS, and never copies their stylesheet — generate --brand runs entirely offline against the shipped catalog.

That is also why a recipe can be approximate and still be useful: it is honest about what it pins (one documented colour) rather than pretending to reproduce a design system.

Next Steps

• Presets — the nine generated families.
• Generation styles — what --style changes.
• Explain a theme — see a recipe's anchors and provenance.
• Diff two themes — compare a brand recipe against a preset.