Shopify's new Horizon theme with AI power and deeper customization for more control.
Shopify's Summer 2025 release is a major step forward in e-commerce design with the introduction of Horizon, the flagship theme starring its new AI-powered theme building platform. Not only does this theme look beautiful—it's intelligently designed to give merchants and designers fantastic tools for building beautiful, responsive, and fully-branded stores faster than ever.
A New Age of AI-Powered Design
Central to Horizon is Shopify's revolutionary AI design process. Whether you're launching a storefront from scratch or revamping an existing brand, Horizon simplifies every step:
10 Ready-to-Use Presets: Start with a pre-designed look and customize it to your brand's voice and style.
AI Block Generation: Just describe what you want to Shopify, like a "discount banner with product highlights" and Shopify will generate automatically an editable block full of real content.
Drag-and-Drop Theme Blocks: Rearrange your site structure as fast as rearranging apps on your phone.
30+ Modular Content Blocks: Preview and add content pieces à la carte to build your information you want.
Horizon gives store owners the confidence to go live quickly with a polished store and the flexibility to push their creative limit to new levels. The responsiveness of the AI designs works really well and creating sections to showcase store content from products to collections. The feature creates a new section file within the code base of the theme still allowing you to customize the finer details. Creating custom AI generated theme sections is a great feature. While downloading the updated theme code any custom section will not be added to the updated theme. There is a requirement to recreate the custom sections or coping the custom block file over to the new theme. When I later downloaded the update Horizon theme on another store the AI created section was carried over to the new site, but was no longer including the AI prompt field and resembled a regular section.With the AI generated sections inside the created liquid file the prompt used to create the section is added as a comment to the top of the file for those looking to get that prompt back. With all theme updates it creates an updated theme so going back into the customizer for the original theme you can retrieve the prompt from there.
From Vibe Designing to Vibe Coding
Hand-coding to AI-powered theme customization is a tremendous win for designers. With Shopify's new AI-based component builder:
You can build entire sections from a text prompt, and the AI will return usable, editable theme section. From your initial prompt getting the custom section. If the design doesn’t fully meet your needs you can adjust the prompt to dial in the design.
The need to code custom sections from design or make modifications to section to change style, Designers can use prompts to build the custom sections they need.
The AI even gives real-time suggestions, giving creative sparks to those who are not sure how to start.
Every section created by the AI remains in your theme's code, offering full access for further personalization be it stylistic tweaks or accessibility conformance with WCAG standards. When testing prompts to create section asking for enhanced accessibility be applied to the section the code creation fell short so there remains the need to update code to stay compliant. With many of the features that are commonly requested on Shopify stores the new AI features getting those sections is easier then ever. Making the section you want to showcase your products is possible without paid themes or hours of coding that make theme upgrades more complicated. Previously making custom sections made it impossible to upgrade your theme without loosing all the changes you made carryover with the your theme.
Working to create custom sections using the new AI tool is very helpful to generate your ideas without the need to code. Learning to generate the correct prompt within the ability of the AI will take some getting used to. While trying to create simple component the AI accomplished the task with ease. Once the component becomes more complex running a few modification prompts the AI still has a little trouble generating the idea. While trying to create a featured collection slideshow with display products the settings looks aligned to handle the section, but the actual component did not display the elements when assigned.
Nested Elements: Total Control, No Compromise
With the nested block direction that the new Horizon theme is taking it allows you to reuse components across various sections in the theme. Customizing product cards is is now more customizable then checkboxes on many of the sections. Being able to add custom text from metafields on your product cards displaying the information you want up front. With so many of the themes before getting custom information outside of the product details page required sacrifice or custom coding to add the information needed to product cards or collection lists. Now with the reusable components adding a text field and assigning a metafield makes it easier then ever. Now with a new feature to group components like text, buttons, reviews banners or even a custom AI component. Easily organize sections and customize the reusable components in a new way that give the the freedom to change a product card on a featured collection and then change that same card on the collections page. Situations I have needed to build components with custom coding before in order to show/hide content based on collection types was a pain and blocked store owners from updating easily later. With the open nesting blocks and groups you are free to customize the parent component to the desired need of the main template. The new nested blocks and grouping feature lets you build the components the way you need them without the rigid structure of themes before.
Improved Animation & Interaction
Horizon also brings subtle but powerful animations that enrich the user experience:
Hover effects spring to life with product information.
Page transitions are smooth, engaging flows across the site.
These kind of micro-interactions may be small but actually help create a more engaging and more joyful user browsing experience that customers will want to engage with. With the new page transitions creating a more cohesive experience for your store. When clicking on a product seeing product image page transition adds the added level of delight while shopping. Page transitions can give the customer a perceived level of better performance in your site avoiding the page load gap many users see and connect to lower site performance.
More Section Options
Out of the box Horizon theme now offers more sections while also retaining the classic sections like Image with Text and Featured Collection. With the new sections like Pull Quote and Hero: Marquee you can add more style to your store. With an emphasis on storytelling the theme adds more ways to build a background to your product offering. With an additional editorial touch breaking away from the common grid design allows store owners the ability to stylize their collections, products or use it for storytelling. New sections integrating animation and layout gives more options to set up your store.
Final Thoughts
Horizon's theme anticipates a bold future of Shopify design where merchants, designers, and agencies can build inspiring storefronts with less headache and more substance. With intelligent AI assistance, liberal layout options, and sharply tuned customization tools, the Horizon theme empowers all to create better stores faster—and with much more style.
With only some small hiccups on theme updating and code creation, this first generation AI powered theme generation is a leap forward. Whether you’re rebranding or launching your first store, Shopify’s AI themes with Horizon at the helm are opening a new dimension of design possibility. With all things considered the new freedom store owners will have Horizon is the wave of the future.
If you need help with your Shopify store, feel free to reach out to our team of experts.
