--- title: Stripe Elements Appearance API basics slug: stripe-elements-appearance-api-basics published_at: 2022-03-18 16:00:18 +0000 updated_at: 2023-01-30 22:52:25 +0000 summary: description: In this episode, you'll learn the basics for working with the Appearance API to style the PaymentElement. You can pick a theme, then customize specific variables, and ultimately define custom rules to design your Payment Element to match your brand. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 02:08 Apply a theme 06:45 Apply rules 08:03 Form input configuration options 08:45 Conclusion ### Resources Elements Appearance API https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/appearance-api ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 Attachments Options Drop files to attach, or browse. tags: [stripe, payments, Stripe Elements, Elements, PaymentElement, Appearance API, appearance, stripe element appearance api, @cjav_dev] views: 2306 author: CJ Avilla url: https://www.cjav.dev/videos/stripe-elements-appearance-api-basics youtube_url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzWo7J5t_Wc youtube_id: hzWo7J5t_Wc embed_url: https://www.youtube.com/embed/hzWo7J5t_Wc thumbnail_url: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hzWo7J5t_Wc/hqdefault.jpg type: video --- # Stripe Elements Appearance API basics *Published: March 18, 2022* *Views: 2306* ## Watch [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzWo7J5t_Wc) [![Stripe Elements Appearance API basics](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hzWo7J5t_Wc/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzWo7J5t_Wc) ## Description In this episode, you'll learn the basics for working with the Appearance API to style the PaymentElement. You can pick a theme, then customize specific variables, and ultimately define custom rules to design your Payment Element to match your brand. ### Presenter CJ Avilla - Developer Advocate at Stripe - https://twitter.com/cjav_dev ### Table of contents 00:00 Introduction 02:08 Apply a theme 06:45 Apply rules 08:03 Form input configuration options 08:45 Conclusion ### Resources Elements Appearance API https://stripe.com/docs/stripe-js/appearance-api ### Support If you have a question, please feel free to reach out to our support team on Discord at https://stripe.com/go/developer-chat ### Updates Sign up to stay updated with developer news: https://go.stripe.global/dev-digest ### Feedback If you have any feedback about this or other episodes, let us know: https://forms.gle/VjNqzRhotM2snYo88 Attachments Options Drop files to attach, or browse. ## Transcript [Music] hey how's it going in this episode you'll learn about the appearance api uh so i'm just hacking around on a little demo here and i'm using the payment element and you'll notice that the rounded corners here don't really match the button so really the only thing on this page that was part of our css before was this sort of salmony colored uh header and then this huge pink pill button that has these really rounded bubbly corners and what i wanted to do was apply that to the payment element so that the payment element looks sort of so that it fits into our style and uh there it turns out that there's this appearance api that's part of the payment element and there's kind of like three different tiers to where how you can style something and i thought it might be fun to just kind of go through that so we can start by picking a theme and there's a couple of the pre-built themes here so one of them is like knight one of them is flat etc so the way that we do this is we go into the appearance to the appearance object and this ends up getting passed into stripe elements here so that we when we're creating the payment element so right now i have the theme set to stripe we can set it to i don't know flat and let's see what that gives us so then if it's flat it will look like this that's kind of neat i like that the border radiuses are much closer to what we have um in uh yeah in in our actual like implementation but it's not perfect let's also try out night and just see what that looks like all right oops refresh the wrong page okay oh night look at that that is like um that's definitely a dark mode sort of theme that's cool you can't really yeah okay it doesn't it doesn't match ours at all right or we can set it to none um i think let's try setting it to none and see what happens then so if we set it to no theme oh wow there's like no borders or anything okay so i think i want to start from the stripe theme and then after we have a theme picked there's a bunch of different variables that we can use to style it so this is a sort of like css variables but we're applying them inside of javascript so if we want to we can just copy that what does that give us if i drop in those variables there come back over here and refresh okay so the space kind of got a little bit tighter and um that's not exactly what i want to do but it proves that we can just like pass in variables as an object here so let's see what we want to do in terms of variables i think if we change the color the primary color it i i'm hoping it changes the color of the background i don't know let's see so if we set the primary color to what is the color of our our salmon color here so if we inspect here and then look down in our css variable stuff over here um the headline color is this edi something something something so we'll just paste that in there and now let's take a look and see what that gives us oh nice nice nice okay so now we have like a sort of a nice round or sorry a nice color at least around a yeah around the card thing or around after pay or around wechat pay so again this is for like if you're gonna build a custom form but the corners are not as rounded as we want we want some border radius okay so the border radius here in our app is 20. i know it's very bubbly it's a very bubbly border radius but look at that oh wow okay it's getting much closer it's getting much much closer to our style um all right so then uh there's a bunch of other things that we can play with font family uh i guess like okay so if i type in an email here then i get this sort of link with stripe thing that we're going to talk about at some point nice okay so just by having that color picked out now like all of our buttons are sort of changed to that color um all right so if i say let's let's log out and see um if we can make it look even closer so the font here i guess we do want to apply the font family so let's apply the font family next so we'll say font family is and then what is our font family so it's this uh this font family here is our font family that we want to apply um so let's drop that in and that's going to be a little hard to tell because it's pretty close to the default but it does look super clean i am a big fan of that it's looking so beautiful um okay what else can we do though so there's a bunch of colors for danger border sort of danger text success backgrounds i guess right now our inputs don't actually have a different background color but if we wanted to we could make the background color sort of like darker gray i don't know let's let's try that out and see what happens okay yeah so that really pops you know what i want to do is i'm going to add another um another input to our field so that we can see what it looks like with our own custom input so maybe after the email address we'll add like a label for the um i don't know phone no no how about um age uh yeah you have to enter your age to get access to this thing let's see uh type is the number yeah okay thank you um auto complete all right so this age looks not great uh but whatever so like inside of our css do we have um we have some oh uh okay so it needs to be sr input so we've got to give it a class index okay so this should be i think class is sr input let's see what we get there nice okay so now our our inputs look the same and then do we need a label no the label should be good okay and then i guess maybe we'll we'll update our css to match to match uh the appearance api so let's give our our label or like our inputs um a background text of that well actually let's leave it the same so that we can see the differences here so this is clear or like it's just uh you know whatever the default background color is for an input and then this is going to be like styled like the payment element there are also a bunch of rules so we can apply specific rules to individual things so like if we wanted there to be more space uh above one of the um one of these these inputs we could apply a rule that applies directly to a css class and again it follows this sort of pseudo css selector style let's take a look at all the different rules and all the css input things we can apply it to so we've got tab label input we can apply it when it's focused so maybe we can say something like rules and then we can say like dot tab colon focused and this is going to be an object where we can apply some sort of rule so this oh this gives us the um the breakdown of all the different parts and pieces so the tab icon is going to be this icon situation here then we have the tab and then we have the tab label so the tab icon was what i was trying to color earlier can we change the tab icon from up here color logo tab oh that just gives us the preference of light or dark okay so then yeah so there's all these different there's tons of different inputs and controls and places where we can apply stuff one thing that's really neat is that we can have the the labels float inside of the inputs so let's try around with let's play around with that a little bit so floating labels so we can make these floating um where else is this oh labels oh we can just apply it at the very top okay so let's try that so labels floating all right what does this give us oh sweet okay so now like card number instead of it being a label that's outside it's inside same with email now our label is not floating anymore so that's kind of annoying but that's because our css isn't as sophisticated as the payment element one so this is this is uh this is pretty cool it's all really fun stuff that lets you really get into and customize the payment element to match your style if you have really interesting styles i'd love to see kind of how you have how you've really customized this to match your site thanks so much for watching we'll see in the next one --- [Back to all videos](https://www.cjav.dev/videos) --- ## Hey Agent, thanks for visiting! 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