Building a public Shopify theme is not just a technical challenge, it’s long‑term product work.
Every decision must scale across thousands of merchants, survive platform changes, and remain understandable years later.
Clean Canvas is a strong example of what this kind of work looks like in practice.
Clean Canvas
Clean Canvas is one of the longest‑running and most successful Shopify theme companies.
They’ve been part of the Shopify Theme Store since its earliest days (around 2010–2011) and are currently the largest supplier of themes on the store.
Their themes have been used by over 80,000 merchants across different business models and regions.
Themes Built by Clean Canvas
Some of their best‑known Shopify themes include:
- Impulse
- Motion
- Prestige
- Streamline
- Enterprise (their newest theme)
Each theme targets a different merchant profile, but all share the same underlying philosophy: intentional flexibility without chaos.
Our Interview with Clean Canvas on How to Public Shopify Themes
To better understand how they think about themes at this scale, we sat down with their CEO for a behind-the-scenes conversation.
How they come up with theme ideas
Post‑pandemic, Clean Canvas saw a sharp shift in merchant behavior. Many businesses had scaled online extremely quickly, while others were entering e‑commerce for the first time through dropshipping. Stores were larger, catalogs were heavier, promotions were constant, and expectations around conversion and customer experience were much higher.
Enterprise, the newest theme from Clean Canvas was designed to serve:
- Large inventories
- Promotion‑focused stores
- Dropshippers and high‑SKU merchants
- Businesses prioritizing conversion rate optimization and retention
Rather than iterating on existing themes, Clean Canvas deliberately chose to build something they hadn’t focused on before.
Decisions that scale across thousands of stores
One of the most important—and expensive—decisions was to build a framework before building the theme.
Instead of starting with Enterprise directly, the team created a boilerplate theme. This internal framework established:
- Coding conventions
- Linting rules
- File structure and patterns
- Baseline product and collection pages
The boilerplate was built from scratch, inspired by Dawn’s principles.
This foundation alone took roughly 8–9 months to complete.
Enterprise development then ran in parallel with the framework, bringing total development time to around 16 months.
Approach to Design and UX When Developing New Themes
Clean Canvas places user experience at the center of theme design.
Their philosophy is simple:
- Function First, Then Form
- Themes are tools, not artworks.
There is always a tension between design and functionality, but they consciously leans toward function over form.
Merchants use themes to achieve real business goals—launch faster, convert better, and provide a smooth customer experience.
Themes are built to:
- Help merchants get to market quickly
- Give customers an intuitive, frictionless shopping experience
- Allow brand expression without breaking core behavior
Classic design principles like spacing, hierarchy, readability, and consistency, are visible across their themes and design systems.
Attention to Detail and Testing
Every small interaction, layout choice, and UX detail is carefully mapped out and tested.
This level of detail can feel excessive, but it ensures predictability across thousands of stores.
Design must also account for:
- Different browsers and devices
- Varying screen sizes and input methods
- Right-to-left languages
- Merchants with long or short product titles
- Hundreds of theme settings that can dramatically change layouts
A design that looks perfect in a static mockup must still work when merchants start changing settings in unexpected ways.
From Design to Development: An Iterative Process
The lead designer creates high-fidelity designs, which act as a starting point.
From there, developers work closely with the designer to translate those visuals into flexible, configurable sections.
This process involves:
- Breaking designs into reusable components
- Deciding which parts should be customizable
- Ensuring settings can scale across many use cases
- Iterating through constant feedback between design and development
It’s impossible for a designer to predict every configuration.
Collaboration and iteration are essential to make designs work in a theme environment
UX and Theme Performance Considerations
For Enterprise especially, speed was a major requirement because fast sites convert better.
Google also favors fast-loading sites for SEO.
Design decisions were made with performance in mind:
- Reducing the number of fonts to lower load times
- Keeping media queries consistent
- Avoiding unnecessary visual complexity
- Ensuring layouts remain fast across devices
Good UX is not just about how a site looks, it’s about how quickly and smoothly it responds.
Avoiding Code Bloat from the Start
One of the earliest decisions was to avoid third-party libraries.
Enterprise theme does not include jQuery, slider libraries, or large external dependencies.
Any JavaScript or CSS that exists in the theme must serve a clear purpose.
Instead of relying on general-purpose libraries, Clean Canvas built features in-house, tailored specifically to the theme’s needs.
This reduces file size, improves control, and avoids shipping code that merchants never use.
Code Splitting and Loading Only What’s Needed
A major performance improvement comes from code splitting.
Traditionally, themes bundled all CSS into one file and all JavaScript into another.
This means every visitor downloads a large amount of code, even if most of it isn’t used on that page.
Because Shopify supports HTTP/2, the browser can efficiently load many small files without performance penalties.
- CSS and JavaScript are split by feature and section
- Code is loaded only when a section is actually used
- No unnecessary assets are loaded globally
For example: If a merchant adds a slideshow section, only then are slideshow.css and slideshow.js loaded
Lazy Loading Images and Code
Lazy loading is applied beyond just images.
Images are lazy-loaded wherever appropriate, which is now standard practice, but Enterprise also lazy-loads JavaScript and CSS.
A good example is the product comparison feature: the comparison popup is part of the theme, but its code is not loaded by default.
The CSS and JavaScript for the popup are only loaded when the merchant clicks the “Compare” button, which helps keep the page fast.
If a customer never uses that feature, the browser never downloads its code.
Performance-Friendly Theme Settings
Performance is also exposed to merchants through theme settings.
For example:
- Animations can look great, but they can hurt performance above the fold
- Animations near the top of the page can negatively impact metrics like LCP and CLS
To address this, Enterprise allows merchants to:
- Enable animations globally
- Disable animations for key above-the-fold sections like slideshows
This lets merchants fine-tune performance without touching code.
Performance becomes a shared responsibility, supported by thoughtful defaults and clear controls.
Designing for Developers and Customizable Themes
UX is not only for merchants and customers—it’s also for developers.
Clean Canvas focuses heavily on:
- Clean, readable code
- Clear variable names, even if they are longer
- Well-organized files and snippets
- Inline comments and documentation
In the Enterprise theme , they also expose many JavaScript events (cart updates, variant changes, drawer interactions).
This allows developers and agencies to customize behavior without hacking core files.
Good documentation, exposed events, and predictable patterns make the theme easier to extend, safer to update, and faster to work with.
Clean Canvas treats UX as a long-term system that must work for merchants, customers, developers, agencies, and future maintainers.
Balancing flexibility, performance, clarity, and design is complex, but this balance is what makes building high-quality public themes both challenging and rewarding.
Advice for Developers Thinking About Themes
One of the most practical insights from the interview: you don’t need to build a public theme to benefit from theme expertise.
Learning how themes work deeply makes you valuable to:
- Agencies
- Shopify Plus partners
- In‑house merchant teams
- Theme companies themselves
Theme development skills transfer directly into better career opportunities, even if you never publish your own theme.
Themes are best created by teams where designers, developers, and testers work together to catch usability issues early.
What feels obvious to a developer often does not make sense to a merchant.
Testing should go beyond finding bugs and focus on real merchant use cases, because poor usability quickly leads to higher support load and long-term problems for both the product and the team.
For junior developers, attitude matters as much as technical skill.
Curiosity, humility, communication, and openness to feedback are more important than perfect code.
Watch the Full Interview
If you’re serious about Shopify theme development, this interview is worth watching in full: