Using Themes, Color Sets and Inheritance Hierarchies

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Transcript is as follows:

Themes give you control of the overall look of your Mind Map in a single simple setting. This allows you to very easily create great looking, consistent Mind Maps. You can easily experiment with different looks for your Mind Maps.

When you apply a theme to your Mind Map, it will introduce a new default color set and font set, as well as setting the styles of the topics, callouts, floating topics, connections etc, but you will only see the impact where you have not explicitly overwritten the standard styles with your own custom settings. In other words, if you have changed something, then that change will be honored.

To select a theme, you can use the Format / Change Theme… menu item, or click on the Theme icon on the toolbar. You will be shown a list of the available themes like this:

What you see is a sample Mind Map styled using the theme, and the default color set for that theme.

You can just double-click on a theme to use it.

When your theme is applied to your Mind Map, it changes any default settings, but will not affect your custom settings. For instance, if you have chosen a different color set, then it will not change the colors of your Mind Map when you change the theme, but if you then revert to the default color set, then it would use the color set from your chosen theme. Similarly, if you have changed topic shapes, colors, or fonts etc, these will be left the way you have set them, but if you revert to the default, then they will be changed to the theme’s settings.

There is also a button which allows you to reset the current Mind Map to the theme defaults. This is particularly useful in two situations: firstly, if you have been playing around with lots of custom colors and topic shapes and just want to reset everything to the theme settings so as to take advantage of the automatic formatting that comes with the theme system. The second situation is if you have imported a document (for example from a NovaMind 4 file), and you need to reset the settings so you can take advantage of the power of the themes. Choosing this option will remove all the custom settings for the map background, and all the custom formatting of shapes, lines, fill colors, children coloring, effects and connection lines. All are returned to their default values, calculated based on the selected theme.

You can have different themes on different Mind Maps within your document.

Themes are quite intuitive to use, and you can play around with settings pretty easily and get a feel for what happens, but I think the more you understand about themes, color sets, font sets, and the settings that override them, the more effectively you can make use of them, so I will walk you through the whole thing and show you a detailed example.

It may help to think of themes and styling like this:

The theme system is comprised of three parts: The first part is the overall layout of the Mind Map with the topic shapes, layout information, and font sizes at the different levels and for different types of item. For instance, it can define all the styling attributes of the Mind Map title, the first level, the second level subtopics to as many levels as you want, both in layout, topic shape, connection styles, font sizes, fill colors, and line colors, and it can do the same for callouts, shapes and floating topics, and even define different settings for callouts and shapes on first level topics as compared to when they are attached to second level topics and so on. The second part of a theme is a default color set, and the third part is a default font set.

You can override the default color set and font set, to tweak the theme that is applied to the Mind Map. The combination of the selected theme, color set, and font set make up the theme as it is applied to the Mind Map.

Themes are extremely powerful, and are able to take away the requirement for just about all the custom formatting to get a Mind Map looking great. This means that you can concentrate on content, while NovaMind automatically keeps it looking great.

So we have mentioned that a theme sets the default formatting for your Mind Map, but all of the settings are like a hierarchy where the top items have the widest reach but the least power, and the lower level detail you get to, the more power the option has to fix the formatting no matter what, but as you go down, the settings affect fewer and fewer topics.

So the first level is the overall theme, and the color set and font set choices which can modify the theme. I put all of these at the top of the hierarchy because together they make up the theme as applied to the Mind Map. The second level is the automatic children coloring settings where you can set up things like rainbow or color array coloring, and children layout settings, and then with just very slightly more power, you have the the inherited fill and stroke colors and shape settings. We’ll still call them the second level because the only time where they take precedence is where you have both children automatic coloring set up and the children inherit fill or stroke set on the same topic, the children would inherit the fill or stroke as that takes the precedence. The third level is the actual specific settings like a custom positioned topic, custom fill, stroke, shape and text settings.

And for any of the custom settings, you only override what you need to override, and all the rest of the settings come through the hierarchy, but to let the themed coloring in particular have more power within the system, you can choose themed colors, so that you can change the overall look of the Mind Map very easily, just by choosing a different color set.

So for instance, to work out what fill color to draw for a topic, NovaMind would go through and say, has the user explicitly set the fill color for this topic? If so, the topic will be drawn with that color. If it was a themed color, the color will be worked out based on the current color set. If the user hasn’t explicitly set the color, NovaMind looks up the hierarchy of parent topics to see if any of them define a fill color for their children topics either through the children inherit fill settings, or children automatic coloring. It only looks up the parent hierarchy as far as a callout or floating topic, seeing as you don’t want your settings on your main Mind Map to alter the settings of the children of floating topics or callouts. If the first topic it comes across uses the children inherit fill settings, it uses that. Otherwise, if it finds one that sets children automatic coloring, it will use the color from that. And if it doesn’t find anything that has been overridden from the defaults, it gets the color based on the theme and color set.

As well as the obvious benefits where as you can make the Mind Map look the way you want it by only changing a few settings, the combination of these different levels also means that when you are adding new topics to your Mind Map, in most cases they will automatically be formatted the way you want them, and when you reorganise your Mind Map by grafting topics to different positions, the formatting gets updated automatically, while at the same time, where you really want to take control, you can.

So let’s work through an example. This Mind Map has had nothing done to the formatting of any of the topics, with the exception that we have explicitly set all the topics to be rounded rectangle topics so that we can see the fill color on them all. Everything else is coming from the theme. We have set up a hierarchy of topics and subtopics and we will be talking about how the fill color is determined for our special “magic topic”. We have floating topics, shapes, and callouts so you can see what the themes do to the different types of elements.

As we change the theme, the layout of the Mind Map changes, and the coloring of our magic topic changes as per the theme settings.

The default theme has different colors for the floating topics as compared to the Mind Map, and a variation of the top level color as the color of its subtopics. The business theme leaves the floating topics, and subtopics everywhere the same color except for the descendants of callouts. The presentation theme makes everything a bit bolder, and as the colors are darker, the automatic text coloring makes the text white. With the rainbow theme, you can see that the floating topic has children that use alternating rainbow colors, while the Mind Map and callout children use ordinary rainbow coloring, but with different start angles. The simple theme is as its name would suggest – normally just about everything would be line topics for this theme but we are not seeing that since we have explicitly set the topic shapes.

So let’s just go back to the default theme and play around with color sets. Let’s choose the business green theme. You can see that the color of the Mind Map title changes and the color of the floating topic changes, and their descendants change to the equivalent colors in the other color set. if you think of the color set as a grid with base colors and variations, then if the color used for the topic is color 5 variation 4, then in one color set this might be a mid green, and in another, it would be a mid blue, but the whole idea is that all the colors go together nicely. Let’s revert to the default color set.

OK, so our magic topic is colored according to the theme color. Now let’s select the first level subtopic and change the coloring mode to rainbow coloring. As you can see, our magic topic is now inheriting the rainbow color, but the children of the callout have not been affected because the effects of children coloring do not jump across to floating topics or callouts. You would have to set it on the floating topic or callout explicitly to affect its children topics. Now if we change the theme, or color set, you can see that none of the subtopics of our rainbow topic are affected.

Now let’s select the next level down, and choose a fill setting as a themed color, and tell the children to inherit this color. As you can see, our magic topic is now colored according to this color. Seeing as we have used a themed color, when we change color sets, it will update to an equivalent color in the other color set, so although we have taken control of the color, we are still letting the color set have an impact. Of course if we had chosen an explicit color, then it would not change no matter what we do with the color set, so let’s do that on the magic topic itself. Now no matter what we do anywhere else, that magic topic is not going to change its fill color.

Now, let’s look at what happens when we graft topics to different places.

This topic has rainbow coloring set for its children, so it will itself get the appropriate color for where it is grafted, but it will continue to determine the color for its children.

This topic has a color set for itself, and determines the color of its children, so that will be transferred.

And this one doesn’t set any colors, so will get the colors from its new location.

And our magic topic is 100% custom fill coloring, so will not change its colors no matter what we do with it.

And finally, let’s go back to the old structure, and see how to undo each of these custom settings.

On the magic topic, you would revert to the default fill color, or if you wanted to revert all the settings on the topic, you could just right click it and reset the formatting.

On this topic, we could stop it from setting its children’s colors, or we could just revert to its default fill settings.

On this topic, we had set it to automatically color its children, so we could just revert that to the default.

And for the Mind Map, if we have set a custom color set, we can revert to the theme by choosing the default color set.

So you can see that the whole theme and styling system is both very powerful and very flexible, taking the majority of the work out of formatting your Mind Maps.