Colour and style¶

The three chips¶

Near the bottom of the tool palette are three colour chips:

Stroke — the outline
Fill — the inside
Text — the label

Select something, click a chip, and change it. The same three chips appear in the Shape Properties panel if you'd rather work there.

Setting defaults

Click a chip with nothing selected and you're setting the default for the next thing you draw. Out of the box that's a white fill, a near-black stroke, and dark grey text.

Library shapes and your colours¶

Once you've set default colours, what happens when you drag a shape out of a library? It depends on the shape.

A plain black-and-white shape (most of them) is a blank. It takes your current fill, stroke and line weight.
A shape that comes with colours of its own, such as an Azure or AWS icon or a Green Walls plant, keeps them. Somebody chose that blue on purpose.

Want the other result for one shape? Hold Alt while you drag it out of the library.

Changed your mind after it's placed? Select it and choose Edit ▸ Apply Current Colors (Cmd+Alt+A, also in the right-click menu) to give it your current fill, stroke and line weight. Edit ▸ Reset to Library Colors (Cmd+Alt+R) goes the other way and puts a library shape back the way its library draws it.

Why is there a command for this?

While a shape is selected, the chips show that shape's colours, not your defaults. So your purple is still remembered, you just can't see it. Apply Current Colors fetches it.

If you'd rather a whole library always behaved one way, that's a setting. See Initial colours.

The colour popover showing the palette and texture grid

The Color row, just below the colours, shows the colour in effect as a chip with its hex value beside it. Type #RRGGBB and press Return if you know exactly what you want. Double-click the chip to open the macOS colour picker. The i button explains the hex format.

Two tabs:

Palette — a fixed grid of 60 colours, plus any custom palettes you've made.
Color Picker — a colour spectrum with Hue, Saturation and Brightness sliders. Each slider has a field beside it, so you can type an exact value.

The fill, line and text popovers each remember which tab you last used.

In both tabs, single-click applies and double-click applies and closes the popover. Once you know that, styling gets a lot quicker.

There's also a No Color button, for shapes that should have no fill or no outline at all.

Opacity

Opacity lives on the colour, not the object. The Opacity slider sits below the Color row in the fill popover, and under Weight in the stroke popover, whichever tab you're on. Drag the slider or type a percentage in the field beside it. Picking another colour keeps the opacity you set. You can also type an eight-digit hex value. There's no separate per-object opacity control.

Textures¶

Below the colours is a grid of 17 textures plus No Texture: hatching in various directions, pencil fills, watercolour, grain, chalk and so on.

This is where the hand-drawn look actually comes from. A plain flat fill looks like every other diagramming tool; a pencil hatch looks like SimpleDiagrams.

Same rule: double-click a texture to apply it and close.

Line weight and pattern¶

For shapes, lines and polyshapes, the stroke popover also carries:

Line Weight — 1 to 100 points, default 2
Pattern — Solid, Dashed or Dotted (lines and polyshapes only)

Library symbols get an Outline Pattern option instead — Original, Solid, Dashed or Dotted. "Original" keeps the outline the artist drew, which is usually the right answer.

The eyedropper¶

Press I. Click a shape whose style you like — the eyedropper fills up. Now click any other object to give it that style. Keep clicking to keep applying.

Alt-click empties the eyedropper so you can pick up something new.
Clicking empty canvas clears it too.

I don't know why it took until version 4 to add this.

Copy and paste style¶

If you'd rather use the keyboard: Cmd+Alt+C copies a style, Cmd+Alt+V pastes it. These use their own private clipboard, so they don't disturb whatever you've got copied normally.

Quick Styles¶

The Quick Styles panel (Cmd+Alt+5) is where you park the combinations you're using a lot in this document.

The Quick Styles panel with saved presets

Select an object, then click Add Style from Selection (or right-click the object and choose Add to Quick Styles).
Click a saved style to apply it to whatever's selected.
Right-click a saved style for Update from Selection or Delete Quick Style.

A Quick Style keeps the fill, the line colour and weight, and the line pattern. A dashed or dotted style shows that pattern under its swatch, and applying it changes drawn shapes, lines, connectors and library symbols to match. Rectangles, ovals and notes always have solid outlines, so they take only the colours and weight. The six styles every new document starts with don't set a pattern, so they leave existing dashes alone.

Quick Styles are saved in the document, so they travel with the file. You can keep up to 32, which is more than anyone should need.

Custom palettes¶

If you work to a brand palette, make it once and keep it.

In any colour popover, click the Manage Palettes button (the sliders icon above the swatches) to make one. Once you have a palette of your own, a Palette: menu appears beside it so you can switch between your palettes and the Default Palette. Until then the menu stays hidden, because there's nothing to choose.

The Manage Palettes sheet with two palettes and the colour editor

The Manage Palettes sheet has your palettes on the left, the selected palette's colours in the middle and the colour editor on the right. Use + and − under each list to add and remove palettes or colours, and drag colours to reorder them. Each colour can have a texture. The ⋯ menu under the palette list duplicates a palette and imports or exports one as JSON.

Legacy .sdcp palette files from version 4 import here too. Note that importing makes an independent copy — palettes don't stay linked to the file they came from — and nothing is saved until you click Save.