Changing a diagram's look is a matter of picking a new theme and watching the canvas update. livediagram brings the theme picker front and centre in a dedicated dialog, so there is plenty of room to compare looks.
Opening the Dialog
Click the Theme & canvas button in the bottom-right corner of the editor, beside the zoom controls (it is there on every screen size, phones included). It opens the Tab Style dialog on its home, which has two parts: Looks at the top, and Fine-tune below. You can also run Open Theme from the command palette to open the dialog straight on its Colours panel, or Open Canvas Options to land on its Canvas panel.
The button only appears for people who can edit the tab, so it is missing for a Participant or a Viewer on a shared link, in an embed, in zen mode, and in Draw mode.
The dialog is an editor, not a wizard: there is no Apply or Cancel. Every change applies to the active tab as you click, and closing it (with the X, the Escape key, or a click outside it) simply dismisses it without rolling anything back. Undo takes a theme change back like any other edit. Show Me in the dialog's title row takes you on a short tour of it.
Picking a Look
A look restyles the whole tab in one click. Each one sets four things together: the theme, the finish, the tab font and the canvas pattern. After the Mashup card (see below) come twenty-three, six to a page of the carousel: Everyday, Textbook, Whiteboard, Spectrum, Boardroom, Notebook, Seaside, Doodle, Editorial, Midnight, Poster, Workshop, Graph Paper, Daydream, Engineer, Lagoon, Studio, Garden, Billboard, Patchwork, Northern Lights, Coffeehouse and Schematic. Each card shows a small sample diagram drawn in that look, with a line on what it is made of.
To see only the looks of one finish, use the finish dropdown on the Looks heading row, beside the carousel's arrows: All finishes (the default) shows every look, and Flexible, Professional or Sketch narrows the carousel to that finish. The filter is just for browsing: it changes nothing on the tab, and it is back on All finishes the next time you open the dialog.
Eight of them give your boxes different colours: Spectrum, Doodle, Daydream and Patchwork use the Rainbow and Pastel multicolour themes, Lagoon and Poster use Tropical, and Textbook and Schematic use UML, which colours each kind of shape its own way. There are two on every page, mixed in with the single-colour looks.
Picking a look counts as one change, so a single undo takes it back. Elements that carry their own finish or font keep them. A look's card stays selected while the tab still matches it. Change any of the four settings yourself and the tab has its own mix, so no look is selected.
Seasonal Looks
For the holidays, press Seasonal beside the finish dropdown. The carousel swaps to six seasonal looks: Countdown for New Year, Egg Hunt for Easter, Haunted for Halloween, and Christmas Morning, Winter Wonderland and Fireside for Christmas. Each card names its season above the look's name. The season on now, or the next one coming, comes first, but every season is there all year. They bring festive colours and canvas patterns (sparkles, eggs, cobwebs, candy stripes and snowflakes) that you will only find here. Press Seasonal again to go back to the everyday looks; the finish dropdown narrows either set.
Rolling a Mashup
The first card in the carousel is Mashup, marked with a pair of dice. Press it and the tab takes a random look: a theme, a finish, a font and a pattern mixed together from the ones the looks use, so every mashup is a combination you may never have tried, yet always reads well, in light mode and in dark mode alike. Press it again for another one, as many times as you like; the card shows the mashup the tab is wearing. If you have picked a finish in the dropdown, the mashups keep to that finish. Like any look, a mashup is one change, so a single undo takes it back, and once you find one you like you can fine-tune any part of it below.
Fine-tuning
Below the looks, Fine-tune lists four rows, each showing its current setting: Colours (the theme), Finish, Text (the tab's font and text size) and Canvas (the backdrop pattern). Press a row to open that panel in place; the bar across its top (Tab Style, with the panel's name beside it) takes you back to the home. The Canvas panel holds the backdrop pattern and colours, the Text panel the tab's font and text size, and the Finish panel the tab's finish. The rest of this article covers the Colours panel, where you pick a theme on its own.
Picking a Theme
The Colours panel lists every theme in one carousel, nine to a page: Default first, then the rest of the twenty-four built-in themes, then your own custom themes and a New theme card. It opens on the page holding the tab's current theme; the arrows or the page dots move between pages.
Click a theme to apply it; the canvas eases into the new colours. Double-click a theme to apply it and close the dialog in one move.
Every theme works in light and dark mode: each person sees the tab in their own appearance's version of the theme, so you can pick any theme without thinking about who works in which mode.
To build on a built-in theme, hover its card and press Copy: the theme builder opens with its colours filled in, ready to save as a custom theme.
Recolouring Elements
Applying a theme recolours the tab's backdrop and the elements on it, but keeps colours you have hand-set, so deliberate customisations survive the switch. That goes for the backdrop too: a canvas colour, pattern or pattern opacity you chose yourself stays put. Arrows are the one exception: every arrow's stroke always snaps to the new theme's colour, because connectors left on an old hue read as broken. Sticky notes keep their own note colours. A shape carrying a style preset moves to the new theme's version of that preset, and Reset to Default in a shape's presets brings a hand-coloured shape back to the theme's colours.
Double-click a theme to apply it and close the dialog in one move; Undo takes it back if it is not the one.
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