A drop shadow lifts an element off the canvas: cards read as cards, hero shapes get depth, and a key element separates from a busy background. The Shadow controls live in the element's right-click menu (or the ⋯ button on its selection toolbar): open Style, and Shadow sits right after Border. They work on anything that draws a visible body: shapes (icons and data shapes included), sticky notes, videos and link cards. Images and stickers have no Style section, so no Shadow either, and notes on an event storming board skip it too. Text, arrows, freehand strokes, tables and annotations don't carry shadows (a rectangular shadow under a line or a run of text reads as a glitch, not a style).
Picking a preset
Right-click an element, open Style, then the Shadow category. Five tiles cover the common looks:
- None removes the shadow.
- Soft, Drop, and Lifted are increasing steps of elevation, from a whisper of depth to floating well off the page.
- Hard is the zero-blur offset shadow, the crisp "poster" look.
With a mouse, hovering a tile previews it live on the element; clicking commits it. Select several elements and the multi-selection menu's Style has the same category, where a preset applies to every selected element that can carry a shadow.
Dialling it in with sliders
Below the presets, four sliders give you the exact shadow:
- Offset X and Offset Y (each up to 24px either way) set where the shadow falls, which reads as where the light comes from.
- Blur (0 to 48px) sets how soft the edge is; zero is a hard edge.
- Opacity (0 to 100%) sets the shadow's strength.
With no shadow set, the sliders show the Drop preset's values, and dragging any of them starts you from Drop rather than from nothing, so the first drag always produces a visible shadow you can then shape. A whole slider drag is one undo step.
Good to know
- The colour is fixed to a dark ink, so shadows always read as shade and keep working when you switch themes. Themes never add or change shadows.
- Exports match the canvas: PNG, SVG, and PDF exports, plus snapshots and embeds, render the same shadow you see.
- The format painter copies shadows along with the rest of an element's styling. Resetting a shape's style with Reset to Default under Presets clears the shadow; Reset to Theme leaves it alone, since it only touches colours.
- To remove a shadow, pick None, or press Cmd+Z (Ctrl+Z on Windows and Linux) straight after adding it.
Shadows are strongest when they're scarce. Lift the one card that matters with Drop and leave its neighbours flat, rather than shadowing everything, and the eye goes exactly where you want.
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