Customizing Your Room Display
Themes, Colors, and Branding

Short answer: The Room Display ships with two built-in themes — Classic, a light theme with a thick green/red status border you can read from the far end of a hallway, and Midnight, a dark theme for low-light rooms — plus a full Custom theme editor. Custom lets you upload your company logo, edit twelve interface colors individually, or simply type in your company's website address: the app fetches your logo and brand colors right on the iPad and suggests nine ready-made themes that match your brand. On a fleet, push the whole look — theme, colors, logo, brand name — through MDM so every iPad matches without touching each device.

A room display is a piece of your office people see dozens of times a day. It's worth a few minutes to make it feel like yours rather than a generic app screen. Here's everything you can change — and, just as honestly, when we think you shouldn't.

Start with a theme

Open Settings → Appearance → Theme on the iPad and you'll find three options:

• Classic — the default for a reason. White background, dark text, and status colors everyone already knows: a thick green border framing the screen when the room is free, red when it's in use, orange when the meeting is ending soon. It's deliberately unsubtle — the border is the message.
• Midnight — the same layout in evening wear: a deep dark-blue background with cream text, a wine-red border for "in use," and a calm indigo instead of green for "available." It suits dim hallways, AV-heavy boardrooms, and offices where a bright white rectangle glowing at 7pm feels wrong.
• Custom — opens the full theme editor described below.

Themes change the whole feel of the display in one tap, so try Classic and Midnight in the actual room before deciding — a theme that looks great on your desk can be too bright (or too dark) on a wall three meters away.

The Custom theme editor

Choose Custom and everything opens up:

• Your logo. Add it from Photos, from a file, or let the app grab it from your website automatically. It appears in a small footer at the bottom of the display, next to an optional brand name, and as the welcome icon on the setup screen.
• Every color, individually. Twelve colors in four groups: the status colors (available, in use, ending soon, setup), the accent used on buttons and highlights, the background and card colors, and the text colors — down to details like the meeting title and the time-remaining countdown.
• A live preview. The editor shows a miniature display with an Available / In Use toggle, so you see both states before saving. And there's "Reset to Classic" and "Reset to Midnight" if you paint yourself into a corner.

Equally important is what the editor doesn't do: no font choices, no background photos. A display's first job is to be readable at a glance from meters away, and typography experiments work against that.

Type in your website, get nine themes

The shortcut most people should start with: tap Create from Website… and enter yourcompany.com. The app fetches your public homepage, pulls out the site icon, the declared theme color, and the colors your site actually uses most, and prefills your brand name from the site title. Then it generates nine candidate themes — Light, Soft Tint, Warm, Dark, Midnight, Contrast, Brand, and two variants built from your secondary brand color — shown as a gallery of miniature room displays, each switchable between Available and In Use so you can judge the state that matters.

Two details we're proud of:

• It all happens on the iPad. The device fetches your website directly, the way a browser would. Your brand assets and colors are never uploaded to us or to any third party.
• Legibility wins over brand fidelity. If your brand color is too pale to carry white button text, the generator automatically darkens it until the text is readable. Your brand guide may disagree; the person squinting at the booking button will not.

If you already have a logo file, Suggest Themes from Logo runs the same generator from the logo's colors alone.

When to brand it — and when the defaults win

Custom branding earns its keep on client-facing floors (the screen at the door is part of your reception), in coworking and multi-tenant spaces (the operator's brand on every door), and in design-led offices where a stock green screen genuinely clashes with an interior someone chose on purpose.

But the defaults are defaults for a reason:

→ Busy hallways with lots of guests: Classic. Green-means-free needs no explanation in any language. → Dark rooms, studios, evening offices: Midnight. Same information, none of the glow. → A brand palette that's all pastels or grays: keep the built-in status colors and brand the rest. Status must be loud; your accent doesn't have to be. And avoid an accent that competes with green and red — those two carry meaning on a room display.

One more rule: if you brand one display, brand them all. A floor of mismatched colors looks like a mistake, not a choice.

Visible from across the hallway

This is the quiet argument for a color screen. E-paper room displays like Joan and Roomz are elegant and sip battery, but they're grayscale — readable up close, mute from a distance. Your own people learn where they hang and what they say. External visitors — the ones who need the most guidance, arriving late-ish for a meeting in a building they've never seen — get no signal from five doors away. A color-coded border turns passive digital signage into wayfinding: guests scan the corridor and walk toward the green. Whatever theme you build, keep the contrast between the available and in-use states; it's the one design decision doing real work.

What the screen shows

Two non-color settings round out the customization:

• How far ahead to look. Set the upcoming-meetings window to today, the next 24 hours, 72 hours, or 7 days — "what's next" for busy rooms, "what's this week" for quiet ones.
• The room name sits front and center, so name your rooms well — the display is where those names get read most.

What each meeting shows — the title, just the organizer, or "Private Meeting" — is decided by your calendar platform, not by the app: Microsoft 365 room mailboxes often strip subjects by default, and private events hide their titles by design. Here's the full diagnostic guide if your displays show names when you expect titles.

Roll it out consistently with MDM

Setting a theme by hand is fine for one or two iPads. Across a floor, you don't want to walk to every device — and you don't want someone changing the look on a whim.

The Room Display supports MDM managed configuration, so you can push the appearance settings — the theme, all twelve custom colors, a logo URL, the brand name, and the lookahead window — from your MDM (Jamf, Mosyle, Intune, Kandji, and others) and lock them. Every iPad comes up identical, and the settings survive a device reset. See deploying room display iPads with MDM for the full managed-configuration workflow.

A quick customization checklist

• Try Classic vs Midnight in the real room, in real lighting.
• Or type your website into Create from Website… and start from a generated theme.
• Keep available vs in-use loud and distinct — that contrast does the real work.
• Add your logo and brand name on visitor-facing displays.
• Set the lookahead window to match how people use the space.
• On a fleet: push and lock it all via MDM.

Frequently asked questions

Can I put my company logo on the room display?

Yes. With the Custom theme you add a logo from Photos, from a file, or automatically from your website, and it appears on the display alongside an optional brand name.

Does the website theme generator upload my data anywhere?

No. The iPad fetches your public homepage directly and extracts the logo and colors on the device itself — nothing is sent to us or to any third-party service.

Can I use my company's exact brand color?

Yes — all twelve interface colors are individually editable. One guardrail: if your brand color is too pale to carry white button text, the theme generator darkens it slightly so the buttons stay readable.

Is there a dark mode for the room display?

Yes — the Midnight theme is a dark look that works well in dim hallways and boardrooms, and reduces glare at night.

Can I set the same look on all our iPads at once?

Themes are stored per device, but with MDM managed configuration you can push the theme, colors, logo, and brand name to every iPad and lock them — and they survive a device reset.

Related guides

• What a genuinely good room display looks like
• Show meeting title or organizer name
• Deploying room display iPads with MDM