Custom Colour Schemes

Author your own colour scheme, save it to your account, and apply it on any diagram exactly like a built-in one.

The built-in catalogue covers a lot of ground, but sometimes you want your own palette: brand colours, a house diagram style, or a notation of your own. Custom colour schemes let you author exactly that, save it, and reuse it. A saved custom colour scheme behaves just like a built-in one: pick it on a tab and new elements adopt its colours. Custom colour schemes work for everyone, signed in or not, so the canvas keeps working without a sign-in.

Building a colour scheme

You build a colour scheme from the Custom category in the Tab Look & Feel Colour scheme tab. Choose + New colour scheme to open the colour scheme builder. It is fast by default and deep on demand:

Give the colour scheme a name, then set the Base colours: Background for the canvas, Fill for element fill, and Stroke for outlines. From just these three, livediagram derives sensible defaults for everything else, so a usable colour scheme exists after three clicks.

Text sits beside them in the same row. It follows the colours above until you set it, so touch it only when the derived one is not what you want.

Expand Pattern to pick the backdrop pattern, choose an animated one, and set its opacity. There is no pattern colour to pick: it tints itself from your background.

Expand Per-shape colours, an advanced option, to give each shape kind its own fill, border, and text, which is how you reproduce a notation like "diamonds are amber".

A live preview shows a few sample shapes in your in-progress colour scheme, rendered the same way the canvas would, so you see the result before saving. Save stores the colour scheme and applies it to the active tab.

Custom ThemeFillBorderTextCanvasSave theme
The colour scheme builder's colour wells for fill, border, text, and canvas, with a Save action.

Saving and reusing

Custom colour schemes are tied to your account and listed under the Custom category wherever you pick a colour scheme: the Tab Look & Feel dialog and the new-diagram template picker both show them, so you can apply or author one the moment you start a diagram. If you sign up after creating colour schemes as a guest, they carry over to your account.

Managing your colour schemes

The Explorer has a Colour schemes entry under its Library section where you can manage them all in one place: each is shown as a preview card you can Edit, Duplicate, or Delete.

Editing and deleting

Editing a colour scheme opens the same builder again. Deleting one is safe for diagrams that still reference it: they fall back to the default look and keep rendering rather than breaking. If you delete a colour scheme that the diagram you have open is using, that tab reverts to the default colour scheme straight away so the change is visible.

To tweak a built-in colour scheme, start a new custom colour scheme from the same colours and edit from there. The shipped catalogue stays read-only, so your edits never touch the originals.

Was this article helpful?