Google Chrome recently reimagined how themes work on the browser. The team now offers a way for users to pick any color and create a theme around it. This article will teach you how to use those options and create a beautiful new color scheme for your favorite browser.

How to Access New Chrome Themes

The new way to customize Chrome using themes is built into the new tab page design. The new tab page is the page that appears every time you open a new Chrome tab. By default, this is a collection of links to your most visited pages.

To access these settings, open a new tab or enter chrome://newtab to the address bar and hit enter. On the bottom-right corner, click “Customize” with a pencil icon.

This opens up your customize screen. Click “Color and theme”

Option One – Pick one From the Default Themes

The “Color and theme” screen will give you 23 built-in themes to choose from. If you like one of these color options, click on that color to preview the color scheme. If you like what you see, click “Done” to apply the theme.

Option Two – Custom Colors

If you are looking for something different than those built-in themes or if you have a specific color in mind, you can do that too.

To get started, click the first circle on the “Color and theme” screen, the one with a color picker icon.

This opens up a pop-up panel with multiple options to find your favorite color.

An interesting thing to note, you can keep this color picker panel open and browse other websites and choose colors. For example, you can go to a website like Unsplash, look at some interesting photos and pick a color from any image you like.

The color picker panel provides multiple ways to select colors. Here, take a look:

Select Colors From an Image

The color picker panel can also choose colors based on images you upload from your computer. To do that, first, click the image icon on the panel:

On the next screen, click the gear icon and then “New from file”

After you upload a few files, you can use the dropdown to switch between them.

Select a Background Image for Your New Tab Page

The next thing you need to spice up your Chrome theme is an image or color background for the new tab page.

To do that, click the Customize button on the new tab page and choose Background:

You can either pick from one of the collections that Google has put together or upload your own image. To upload an image of your own and make it to your new tab page background, click “Upload from device”

Tip: If you are looking for beautiful images that you can download for free, I recommend Unsplash, my favorite site.

With that, you have your own custom theme for Google Chrome. Feel free to tweak as you go along and make further changes. If you made something cool and want to share it with us, drop in a comment.

You can also customize those links on the new tab page. Read this article to learn more about new tab page customization.