Colour palettes and the picker
A palette card holds a set of colours on your board that everything else can pull from — notes, shapes, arrows, backgrounds and outlines. The picker has a saturation-value pad, hue slider, hex field, presets, an eyedropper, and swatches from any palette on the board. Recently used colours are remembered so a board stays in one scheme.
Colour shows up in two places: as a palette card that holds a scheme, and as the picker that appears anywhere a colour is set.
Palette cards
A palette card is a set of swatches living on the board. Add one from the rail's + menu → Tools → Palette.
It does two jobs. It documents the scheme — visible to anyone who opens the board — and it feeds the picker: every palette on a board contributes its swatches to the colour picker everywhere else on that board. Set a scheme once and the notes, shapes and arrows you make afterwards can be built from it in one click.
The picker
The same picker, everywhere a colour is chosen:
- Saturation-value pad and hue slider for picking by eye
- Hex field for an exact value
- Presets — the standard set
- Palette swatches — from every palette card on this board
- Recent colours — what you have been using
- Eyedropper — sample any pixel on screen, including from a reference image on the canvas
Recent colours are the quiet one that matters most: a board built in one scheme stays in that scheme without anybody maintaining a system.
Where colour applies
| Surface | What you can set |
|---|---|
| Notes | Background, text |
| Shapes | Stroke, fill |
| Arrows | Line colour |
| Groups | Outline colour |
| Canvas | Background — seven presets plus custom |
| Clusters | Cover colour |
| You | Your presence colour |
Readability
Text colour in notes and documents is resolved against the actual background it sits on, so a note authored in a light theme stays readable to someone reading in dark mode. You do not have to think about it and there is no setting.
One reserved colour
The gold accent is reserved for the interface: active state, current selection, focus. It is not part of the content palette. This keeps "this thing is selected" visually distinct from "this thing is gold", which matters on a board where the content is itself colourful.
Building a colour-led look book? The look book maker guide covers the workflow end to end.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the eyedropper sample from?
Anywhere on your screen, using the browser's native colour picker. Sampling a colour straight out of a reference image on the canvas is the usual case.
Will my colours be unreadable in dark mode?
No. Note and document text colours are resolved for contrast against their actual background, so text stays legible whichever theme a reader is using.
Can I reuse a palette across boards?
Copy the palette card and paste it into another cluster. Its swatches then feed that board's picker.
Machine-readable: /docs/canvas/palettes-and-color.md · /llms.txt