A finish is how a tab's elements are drawn, apart from their colours. Every tab has one, and any shape, arrow, text, sticky note or table can carry its own. Switching a finish never changes an element's size, colour or text, so switching back puts everything exactly as it was.
The three finishes
- Flexible is the everyday look: soft rounded corners, medium lines, a gentle shadow under boxes and a paper peel under sticky notes. New tabs start here.
- Professional is crisp and print-ready: square corners, thin lines (line icons included, unless you gave one a weight of its own), clean Inter lettering, no default shadows, and arrows you draw become right-angled connectors. A mind map's curved connectors are drawn as neat right-angled brackets too (straight spokes in a Bubble map), and switching back brings the curves back.
- Sketch looks drawn by hand on a whiteboard: wobbly double-stroked outlines, coloured fills shaded over with pencil lines, a handwriting font (unless the tab or the element has a font of its own), arrowheads drawn as two loose strokes, and icons, stickers, charts and every other element's drawing given a hand-drawn wobble.
Whatever you set on an element yourself wins in every finish. A corner, border width, shadow, arrow thickness or font you picked is drawn as you picked it; a finish only changes what you left unset.
Setting a tab's finish
Open Tab Style (the Theme & canvas button in the bottom-right corner) and press Finish under Fine-tune. Click Flexible, Professional or Sketch, and the whole tab redraws in it straight away: any element that carried a finish of its own follows the tab again. The Preview under the options shows a small sample diagram in the chosen finish, on your tab's background.
Setting one element's finish
Right-click an element, open Style, then Finish. The four tiles are Follow Tab, Flexible, Professional and Sketch. With a mouse, hovering a tile previews it; clicking commits it as one undo step. Follow Tab removes the element's own finish so it follows the tab again. Select several elements and the multi-selection menu's Style has the same category, which sets every selected element that can take a finish.
Good to know
- The sketch is the same everywhere. Each element's wobble is worked out from the element itself, so it looks identical on every screen, after a reload and in exports, and only changes when you resize it.
- Selecting and connecting ignore the wobble. Arrows attach, guides snap and clicks land on an element's true outline.
- Everything is drawn by hand in Sketch, and the words stay sharp. Charts, concept graphics, checklists, progress bars, furniture, panels, buttons, a table's grid and every other element draw their lines and fills by hand, while their words and numbers sit crisply on top in the handwriting font, so small figures stay easy to read. Freehand strokes (already hand-drawn) and photos stay as they are. Sticky notes, frames, lanes and tables keep solid fills so writing on them stays easy to read, and circle and diamond arrowheads keep their shapes because they carry meaning.
- Boxes with things on them stay solid in Sketch. A card under captions, like a flowchart's key, keeps a plain fill so what sits on it stays readable; only shapes that stand alone get pencil shading. Shading always sits over the shape's own colour, so labels stay readable on a light or a dark canvas.
- The palette follows the tab. Shape, text, sticky note, arrow and table tiles show the tab's finish, so you can see how a new element will look before you add it.
- Exports match the canvas. PNG, SVG and PDF exports draw the same finish you see.
- Only Editors change finishes. Participants and Viewers see every element in its finish but can't change it.
Sketch is great for early ideas and workshops: it tells people the picture is still open to change. When it's settled, switch the tab to Professional for the version you share.
Was this article helpful?