Design cascade: set it once, override where you mean to

Uisce has a small set of design choices you make once for the whole shop, and any section that uses them can be told to do something different. You do not have to visit twenty sections to round your cards, and you do not have to accept the same rounding everywhere when one band wants to look different.

Two values work this way today:

• Card corner radius — how rounded card and image corners are.
• Card shadow — how much the cards lift off the page.

Setting the shop-wide default

Theme settings → Layout.

• Card corner radius — a slider, in pixels.
• Card shadow intensity — None, Subtle, Medium or Strong.

Change either one and every section that draws cards follows immediately: service packages, before/after pairs, team credentials, blog cards, collection cards, search results, the cart, and the rest. You are editing one number, not twenty sections.

Overriding a single section

Open any of those sections in the theme editor and you will find these controls, each starting on Use theme default. Sections that draw shadowed cards offer both; the rest offer Card corner radius alone, because a shadow control there would not change anything.

Leave them alone and the section follows the shop-wide value — including later, when you change your mind about the shop-wide value. That is the point: a section left on Use theme default keeps following you.

Pick a specific value instead and that section stops following, for that one setting only. Everything else about it — colour scheme, spacing, content — is untouched, and every other section keeps following the theme default.

To go back, set the control to Use theme default again. There is no hidden state and nothing to clear; the section simply starts following again.

What it looks like in practice

Five sections on the Uisce demo homepage take part: service packages, the featured collection, the before/after pair, team credentials and the journal list.

Change the shop-wide radius in Theme settings → Layout and the service packages and the featured collection follow it immediately. That is the cascade.

Two of them stay square, and that is deliberate. Uisce styles the credential portraits and the journal thumbnails as sharp editorial crops — a preset design decision, not a fault. They keep that look while they are set to Use theme default, however you change the shop-wide value.

Override one of those anyway. Set Card corner radius on Team credentials to Rounded and the portraits round, because an explicit choice on a section outranks the preset's own default. Set it back to Use theme default and the sharp crop returns.

The before/after pair is the shipped exception. It is set to Square on purpose, so the two halves read as one object rather than two cards with a gap between them — visibly different from the rounded default, whatever you set that default to.

Those four steps are the whole mechanism: a global change, a preset default that survives it, an explicit local override that beats the preset, and a reset that gives the preset back.

Things worth knowing

Colour is not part of this. Colour schemes are chosen per section the normal Shopify way, and that has not changed. Uisce deliberately did not build a second, parallel way to inherit colour — the scheme picker you already know is the right tool and works everywhere.

Your existing setup is untouched. Every section starts on Use theme default, so a shop that never opens these controls renders exactly as it did before they existed.

Nested content follows its section. Cards drawn inside a section — product cards in a collection, for instance — follow whatever that section resolved to, whether that is the theme default or a local override.

Mobile and desktop share the value. A section's override applies at every screen size. Per-breakpoint design settings are a separate, later feature.

If a section does not offer the controls

Only sections that actually draw cards have them, because those are the only sections where the values change anything. A section without cards has nothing to round or lift, so the controls would be dead switches — and Uisce would rather show you fewer, meaningful settings than a full set where half do nothing.