Hi Wayne,
Before 3.1.1, aXes did not have the concept of "themes", where a theme is designed once and for all in your application. Thereafter all buttons, labels, drop downs will adopt this theme automatically.
Of course, before, you could design your styles in the application, with css attributes and then assign the styles you have created to extensions.
In axes 3.1.1, we have added the jQuery theme feature which provides a centralised approach for theming your aXes project.
A jQuery theme uses jQuery UI library:
jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions, effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery JavaScript Library.
Axes has pre-installed a few themes which can be chosen from the Application settings. For this, you need to enable the jQuery first (in your application settings) and then all your eXtensions will automatically apply the theme selected, no need to assign the theme to each of them individually.
Of course, you can still define CSS attributes and apply them on top of the theme if you need.
You can also design your own themes at
http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ and follow tutorial 12 to install them in your application.
In regards to the colours, the value in Tutorial 3 is for BLUE is #9CC1E5 (not #9CCLE5). Perhaps that is the problem?
Further on this, both colours #9CC1E5 and #A9CAF7 are just a different shade of BLUE, see below.

- blue_shades.png (3.1 KiB) Viewed 9322 times
Wayne, if you still have problems with tutorial 3, please email me at
jeanmichel.rapin@lansa.com.au in order to get you unstuck ASAP.
Hope this helps.