Every element starts in your tab's theme colours, so a new diagram already looks coherent. When one element needs to stand apart (a warning in red, a dashed box for something planned, a pill-shaped button, a faded background note), its colours, border and opacity are all in its right-click menu. Open the menu by right-clicking the element (a long press on a touch screen), or press the ⋯ button on its selection toolbar. Colours and Border live under Style, which opens beside the menu; Opacity lives under Layer, at the top of the menu.
These controls are for Editors. Viewers and Participants don't get the element menu, so they see your colours but can't change them. In Draw mode and for quick one-click changes, the Quick Style Panel offers the most common colours and strokes without opening a menu.
Colours
Open Style, then Colours. Each row names the surface it paints, shows the colour in force on its right, and opens the colour picker beside the menu:
- Text colours the element's label (all of it; to colour only some words, see Formatting Label Text).
- Background fills the element.
- Border colours its outline.
- Heading appears on a lane and a table, for the lane's title strip and the table's header row.
- Icon replaces Border on a line-art icon, because its stroke is the glyph itself. A Technology icon keeps its brand colours, so it has no Icon row.
An arrow's Colours category has Line and Pointer instead, so the arrowheads can differ from the line (Arrows).
Under the rows, Reset to Theme puts the element's colours back to the tab theme's, as one step you can undo. It only touches colours: borders, shadows and fonts stay as they are.
The Colour Picker
Every colour row opens the same picker, the one used everywhere in the editor. From the top:
- No colour first. The first swatch, a white square with a slash ("No border colour", "No background colour"), clears the colour: a frame or shape shows the canvas through it, or a border simply disappears.
- Theme Palette: the active tab's theme colours, spun into light, base and dark steps plus a neutral ramp, each named by a colour word ("Blue", "Light blue", "Deep blue"). Switch themes and this group follows.
- Standard Colours: ten colours, the same everywhere. Text, Border, Line, Pointer and Icon rows get the strong tone (Ink, Grey, Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Teal, Blue, Violet, Pink); Background and Heading rows get the soft tone, washes of the same hues with White in Ink's place.
- Custom Colours: colours anyone has picked with Add a custom colour in this document, newest first, shared with everyone on it. Add a custom colour (four coloured dots) opens an editor with a saturation square, a hue slider, a hex field and, in browsers that support it, an eyedropper to pick a colour from anywhere on screen. Press Use to apply it.
With a mouse, hovering a swatch previews it on the element; clicking commits it and closes the picker. The keyboard works too: arrow keys move between swatches, Enter picks and Escape closes. On a text or line row, the custom colour editor warns you when a colour would be hard to read on a light or dark canvas, and offers a readable version beside the warning.
Ink and Colours That Adapt
Ink is the first strong standard colour: near-black on a light canvas, near-white on a dark one. A strong standard colour you pick for a shape's text or border, a text element, a sticky note's text, an arrow or a pen stroke is stored by its name, so it is drawn in its version for the canvas you see it on and stays readable when a tab or a reader switches between light and dark. Text with no colour of its own is drawn in Ink. Any other colour is kept exactly as picked.
Borders
Open Style, then Border. Three grids of small preview tiles set the outline, and hovering a tile previews it before you click:
- Strength: no border (a faint dashed outline), then thin, medium, thick and extra thick. New shapes start at medium and tables at thin.
- Pattern: solid, dashed, dotted, dash-dot, long dash and dash-dot-dot.
- Radius: the corners, from none through small (4 px), medium (12 px) and large (24 px) to full. Full rounds the shorter sides completely, giving a pill on a long box and a circle on a square.
Accent Edge
Under the Radius grid, Accent Edge puts a coloured strip down the left side, or across the top or bottom, of a rectangle, a stadium, a card or a mind node: a way to colour-code nodes by team or status without filling them. Edge Colour picks its colour, and Match Border sets it back to the border's colour. It is drawn inside the shape's corners, and the format painter copies it with the border.
A corner is never rounded more than a quarter of the box's shorter side, so a small rounded square stays a rounded square instead of turning into a circle (Full is the exception, by design). Unset, a shape's corners are slightly rounded and the Radius grid highlights small; a mind node's start at medium.
Which Elements Have a Border
- Strength and Pattern are offered on shapes, pen strokes, paths and tables.
- Radius is offered only where a corner can be rounded: the rectangle, the browser frame, cards (callouts included), boundaries and mind nodes. Circles, diamonds, hexagons and the other outlined shapes have their corners built in.
- No Border category on text elements, sticky notes (a note's Border colour row still draws an edge), images, stickers, icons, the actor, and the elements that draw their own faces: charts, progress bars and rings, ratings, timeline rails, code blocks, checklists, legends, Plan boards and cards, portals, reveals, chairs, quizzes, and the banner, header bar, stat row and process components.
A few elements skip Colours too: images and stickers keep their own colours, a code block picks a colour scheme under Presets instead, and charts are coloured from their own data. A note on an event storming board has a short menu of its own with no Style at all, since its colour is what it means.
Opacity
Open Layer, the first section of the menu, and drag the Opacity slider from 100% (solid) down to 0% (invisible). It fades the whole element, its fill, border, text and shadow together, and the canvas shows it live as you drag. A whole drag is one undo step. Opacity sits beside Bring to Front and Send to Back, since fading and stacking are both about how an element sits among its neighbours (see Layer Order). Exports and snapshots show the same opacity you see.
Styling Several Elements at Once
Select several elements and open the menu: its Style section has Colours and Border too, and its Layer section has Opacity.
- Each row and grid applies to every selected element that supports it: a background colour skips text elements, and a border strength skips sticky notes.
- The values shown are read from the first element that has them.
- Colours shows Text, Background and Border as the selection allows. A selection of only arrows shows Line instead of Border, and on a mixed selection the Border colour recolours the arrows too.
- Radius appears when at least one selected element can round its corners, and sets those that can.
- Opacity sets every selected element to the same value.
- Reset to Theme resets every selected element's colours in one step.
Use colour for meaning, not decoration. Keep most elements in the theme's colours and give one kind of thing (risks, decisions, external systems) one colour, and a reader learns the code at a glance. Reset to Theme is the quick way back when a diagram gets too colourful.
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