The Style Panel
Everything about how a selected object looks lives in one panel on the right. Thickness, colour, fill, opacity, dashes, arrowheads, corners, shadow, glow, blur, 3D — pick an object and set them, with the change landing on the canvas as you drag the slider. It's the same panel wherever you draw, so what you learn on a board carries straight into a design.
Finding it
The panel is anchored to the right edge of the canvas, and how you reach it depends on where you are.
On a board or a workflow canvas it's summoned by the selection. Select anything you've drawn and a slim tab slides in on the far-right edge:
— click it and the panel slides out. Click in the panel header to tuck it away again.
That collapsed-or-open choice is remembered, so once you open it the panel keeps opening for every new selection. View → Style Panel toggles the same preference from the menu bar, and the panel disappears entirely when nothing is selected — it never sits there taking up canvas.
In the Designer the panel is one of the three tabs of the right-hand rail, and the rail is always there:
| Tab | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Screens | Every screen in the design, its size and device preset, and the screen background |
| Layers | The layer stack of the selected screen — order, visibility, lock, opacity |
| Style | This panel: the appearance of whatever you've selected |
With nothing selected the Style tab still opens — the controls are replaced by a prompt to select something, and your saved presets stay within reach. In layout and HTML modes the same tab shows the matching layout or element controls instead.
What's in it
Rows appear only when they apply to what you've selected, so the panel is never a wall of controls you can't use. Select a plain line and you'll see a handful of rows; select a filled shape and the fill controls join in.
- Thickness — the width of the outline, on a slider that gives you fine control down at hairline weights and still reaches a broad band at the top.
- Stroke Colour — a colour well plus a Gradient button. The hex value beside it copies to your clipboard on click.
- Fill Colour — for closed shapes. A red diagonal slash across the swatch means no fill yet; click the swatch anyway to give it one. Gradients get their own editor with linear and radial options.
- Stroke Opacity / Fill Opacity — independent, so you can fade a fill and keep a crisp outline.
- Corner Radius — rounds every corner of a rectangle, polygon or image uniformly.
- Line Style — dashes, ends and corners. See below.
- Arrows — start and end decorations for open paths. See below.
- Shadow, Blur, Glow, Backdrop Blur — each behind its own switch, with the controls appearing only once it's on. Backdrop Blur is the glassmorphic one: it blurs what's behind the fill.
- 3D — extrude and light a flat shape.
- Typography — font, size, weight, alignment and spacing whenever text is selected.
A few behaviours worth knowing:
- Select several objects and every change applies to all of them. The values shown are the first object's, so the panel reads as "what I'm about to apply" rather than a mixed state.
- In a group, the enclosing shape is the parent. If a group holds both a shape and text inside it, fill and stroke changes go to the shape only — so restyling a button can't accidentally recolour its label. Ungroup when you want to reach the text's font.
- Locked objects can't be restyled. The panel dims and shows a Locked badge; unlock to continue.
- Every change is one undo step. ⌘Z puts it back.
Line style — dashes, ends and corners
This row appears for shapes and vector paths: rectangles, circles, ellipses, polygons, lines, curves and anything drawn with the Path pen. Freehand ink doesn't have it, because a pen stroke is a filled shape with a pressure profile rather than a line with a width — there's no centre line to dash.
Dashes. Five patterns, each drawn on the button exactly as it will draw on the canvas:
| Pattern | |
|---|---|
| Solid — an unbroken line. The default. | |
| Dashed — even dashes and gaps. The everyday choice for a boundary or a planned route. | |
| Dotted — round dots when the ends are set to Round; a lighter, quieter line. | |
| Dash-dot — the surveyor's and engineer's centre line. | |
| Long dash — longer strokes, fewer gaps; reads as solid from a distance. |
Dash lengths are measured in multiples of the line's thickness, not in fixed pixels. That means a dashed hairline and a dashed heavy band both still read as dashed — thicken a line and its dashes grow with it instead of collapsing into a solid rule. The Spacing slider (which appears as soon as you leave Solid) stretches or tightens the whole pattern from a quarter to four times its natural size.
Ends. How an open path finishes, and how each individual dash is finished:
| End | |
|---|---|
| Flat — the line stops dead on its last point. | |
| Round — a half-circle past the end. The default, and what turns the dotted pattern into actual dots. | |
| Square — a square extends half a line-width past the end. |
Corners. How two segments meet:
| Corner | |
|---|---|
| Sharp — the outer edges run on until they meet in a point. | |
| Round — the corner is arced off. The default. | |
| Bevel — the point is cut flat. |
Pick Sharp and a Sharpness slider appears. A very acute angle produces a very long spike, so past a certain sharpness the corner gives up and bevels itself — this slider is where that limit sits. Lower it to tame spikes on tight zig-zags; raise it to keep needle-fine points.
Everything here survives an SVG export: a dashed, flat-ended, bevelled shape arrives in the exported file dashed, flat-ended and bevelled.
One thing we deliberately don't offer: stroke alignment (inside / centre / outside). An outline always straddles its path, centred. If you need the outline to sit strictly inside a shape, draw a slightly smaller shape.
Arrows
For open paths — lines, curves, polylines and freehand strokes — the Arrows row puts a decoration on either end. Eight styles (none, arrow, triangle, stealth, circle, square, diamond, bar), chosen separately for the Start and the End, plus a Size multiplier relative to the line's thickness so an arrowhead always stays proportional to its line.
Adding an end cap to a line is what turns it into a connector — it's the same mechanism the arrow tool uses when you draw one.
Presets — saving a look and reusing it
Under the controls sits a slim Presets strip: the styles you've saved, as a grid of little swatches. It's the answer to "I've spent five minutes getting this card exactly right and there are eleven more of them".
Saving. Get one object looking the way you want, then click in the Presets bar. The whole appearance is captured in one go — colour, thickness, opacity, fill or gradient, dashes and ends, arrowheads, corners, shadow, glow, blur, 3D, and the typography if it's text. With nothing selected it saves the style your tools are currently set to instead, which is a quick way to bank a palette before you start.
Applying. Click a swatch. Everything selected takes the style, in one undo step, and across every layer the selection spans. Your drawing tools are set to match at the same time, so the next thing you draw comes out in that style too — which means clicking a preset with nothing selected is how you choose what you're about to draw with.
Each preset only gives an object what that object can wear. Hand a dashed-arrow style to a filled circle and it takes the colour, weight and effects, and quietly skips the dashes and the arrowhead — nothing invisible gets written onto it.
The swatches. Each preset is drawn as whatever it is, and they all sit in the one grid together:
- a style saved off text draws as Aa, in that typeface, weight and colour — the only way to judge type
- everything else draws as a shape — a rounded square wearing the fill, outline, dashes, corners and effects
Each swatch is a true miniature, not a small object wearing full-size trim: a heading's outline and shadow are scaled down with the letters, so what you see at 44 pixels is what you'll get at full size.
Right-click a swatch (or press and hold with an Apple Pencil) for Apply, Rename, Delete, and — for the occasional shape style you'd rather judge as lettering — a switch to the Aa face for that one preset.
Where the strip lives. in the Presets bar promotes the grid to its own tab beside Style, which gives it the full height of the panel — useful on a small screen, or on a day spent applying styles rather than building one. puts it back under the controls. collapses the strip to its header when you want the controls back.
Presets are yours, not the document's: one library shared by every board, note and design you open on this device.
Asking instead of clicking
Anything in this panel can also be asked for in plain language, which is often quicker across many objects at once: "make these three dashed", "give every divider a flat end", "same width, 24px apart". The agent edits the objects directly, as one undo step, so you can ⌘Z an instruction exactly like a slider drag.
Works with the rest of the studio
- The Selection Toolbar — the action row that appears with the same selection
- The Smart Whiteboard — where the panel does most of its work
- The Designer — the Screens / Layers / Style rail in context
- Drawing & Vector Tools — the tools that make the objects you style
- Fonts — what the Typography row draws from