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RonMan
RonMan
New Participant
August 8, 2024
Question

Material theme builder disaster. Figma should test and approve significant plugins

  • August 8, 2024
  • 21 replies
  • 2016 views

Material theme builder version 20, released in May 2024, is not operational. The plugin generates theme colours but does not update them in any project files other than the original kit project. This means that if you had any work using Material 3 kit, you are not able to update the theme since May 2024. It is not possible to do any theme-related M3 work with a custom theme since May 2024. Themes in any project that people had done in Material3 UI Kit cannot be updated anymore since May 2024.

There is no other Material theme builder plugin. We are hostages of the situation.

There are tens, if not hundreds, of reports on the M3 DK page and on the Theme Builder itself page where it has been ignored since early 2024.

It appears that version 20 of the plugin was released untested, and the development team was immediately reassigned or disbanded. Nobody from the Material team reads bug reports; nobody responds.

Figma announced the category of UI kits but did nothing else; nobody tests anything that is in the plugin store. The provider uploaded a broken plugin that prevents people from working. Figma allowed this to happen. You have the resources, billions of dollars; couldn’t you assign a developer to fix the M3 Theme builder plugin?

And cue the answer “we will pass your feedback for consideration.” It is a disaster! It is not “feedback for consideration”.

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    Luciano Teixeira
    Luciano Teixeira
    New Member
    July 11, 2025

    After testing it again on a fresh library. It appears to be breaking the associations of the “M3 > sys > light” styles as well as all of the other styles. Out of the box, these styles point to the variables. After running the theme builder, the variable pointers get replaced with hex values, so the theme swap can no longer occur on things that had M3 styles on them.

    The swap will work on objects that had variables assigned directly to them. Those are few and far between in the Material 3 library though.



    I tried somethings after reading your post. Comparing the fresh new kit file with the one the theme builder plugin creates by updating the colors, I noticed that if you link all properties manually only in M3/sys/light the theme switch comes back to life \o/

    Still super annoying doing that, but works. I noticed a little inconsistency in hovering components in dark mode. I submitted a bug report to Material team explaining all that. I hope they get in touch soon.

    Thanks for sharing, Alan.

    Hi Bê Santos, I am from Brazil to.

    Can you tell me how you made the link between the light/dark themes work again on the switch?

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