Most review plugins have a settings tab labelled “Appearance” or “Styling” with about 40 options: button colour, border radius, star colour, card padding, link colour, hover colour, font, line height. You configure all 40 once. Then your theme designer touches one swatch in the theme settings, and now your reviews don’t match the rest of your site anymore. So you go back into the reviews plugin’s appearance tab and update the 40 options. Again.
Trustie skips the tab.
How styling works
Trustie’s CSS doesn’t ship hard-coded colours. It ships CSS variables. The variables come from Brand Hub, Tracksies’s central design system. Configure Brand Hub once (colours, fonts, shadows, border radius) and every display surface Trustie renders picks them up:
- Review cards on the product page
- The floating widget panel
- The auto-generated reviews page
- The testimonial submission form
- The review request email template
- The aggregate rating display
When you update a colour in Designer (Brand Hub’s admin UI), every Trustie surface refreshes. No “also update the reviews plugin” step.
Trustie reads from your theme
The first time Trustie loads, it captures the dominant fonts your theme is using and offers them as defaults in Brand Hub. The accent colour, the body font, the heading font. Override any of them in Designer, but the starting point isn’t “white-on-white” or “WordPress default sans-serif.” It’s whatever your theme already established.
The capture is a one-off on activation. If you change theme later, hit the refresh button to recapture.
Click to copy colours
When you’re in Designer setting Brand Hub colours, the existing colours from your theme show up as swatches you can click to copy into Trustie’s variables. No guessing the hex from a screenshot, no toggling between two tabs, no eye-droppering the right shade.
Why shops turn it on
Every shop already has a brand. Their site already has colours and fonts and shadow styles that took someone time to choose. A reviews plugin that brings its own design system, even a good one, makes the reviews section feel like a different site visited from your site.
Trustie’s styling story is the opposite: read from what’s already there, render in the same language. The result is a reviews section that looks like a part of your site, not an addon bolted onto it.
Why shops turn it on with Pro
Designer itself is in Trustie Free with colours, fonts, shadows, radius all configurable. Trustie Pro adds Pro-specific Designer tabs: the testimonial-request email preview (separate from the review-request email preview Free already has), demographic display styling, and per-source review card variants. The variable system is the same; Pro just has more surfaces and more knobs.