Colour Schemes

Recolour an entire tab in a single click, browse a catalogue of colour schemes by category, and save your own to reuse across diagrams.

A colour scheme is the fastest way to make a diagram look intentional. Instead of colouring each shape, border, and background by hand, pick a colour scheme and livediagram recolours the whole tab at once, from the canvas backdrop to every element on it. The catalogue ships a generous spread of looks, and you can save your own colour schemes too.

What a colour scheme covers

A colour scheme sets the canvas background and pattern together with the fill, border, and text colours of your elements, so the diagram reads as one coherent style. Most colour schemes paint every element the same colours; some are cleverer, tinting each branch of a hierarchy a different hue, or colouring each shape kind by its meaning. Switching colour schemes recolours your shapes but leaves your fonts untouched.

Default, the one that follows you

Every new tab starts on Default, which leads the catalogue and also leads the Dark category — one scheme listed twice, because it has two halves. Which half you see is your own appearance: light chrome shows the white canvas with the familiar blue elements, dark chrome shows the charcoal canvas with grey ones.

That makes it the only colour scheme that differs per reader, and nothing is saved when it changes: a colleague in light chrome sees the light half of the very same tab while you work in the dark one. Every other scheme is a decision stored in the diagram, so it looks the same for everybody.

Browsing and applying

You change a tab's colour scheme from the Tab Look & Feel dialog, reached from the canvas right-click menu, where colour schemes are organised into categories you can browse and drill into. Applying a colour scheme updates the canvas live as you click. See Changing the colour scheme for the full walkthrough.

Theme
The colour scheme picker shows a grid of swatch cards; clicking one recolours the whole tab live.

Beyond a single colour

Two kinds of colour scheme go past the one-colour look. Multi-colour schemes give each branch of a mind map or hierarchy its own hue, the way a rainbow mind map does. And when no built-in colour scheme fits, custom colour schemes let you author your own palette, save it to your account, and reuse it across diagrams.

Quick emphasis

For tweaks to a single element rather than the whole diagram, the style presets in the right-click menu offer one-click colour and border variations derived from the active colour scheme, so a key shape can stand out while still matching the overall look.

Every control in the Tab Look & Feel dialog applies live with no Apply or Cancel, so you can click through colour schemes and watch the canvas change behind the dialog until one feels right.

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