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 |
The Style tab is dimmed until there's something to style, so a greyed-out tab means "select an object first". 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.
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