Event storming is a workshop method for exploring a business domain together. A group puts sticky notes on a wall — things that happened, the commands that caused them, the people and systems involved — until the story of the domain is visible end to end. Alberto Brandolini's notation gives each colour a fixed meaning, so a wall of paper reads the same to everyone who knows the method.
Starting a diagram from the Event storming template gives you a board built for that, rather than a blank canvas you have to shape yourself.
What makes it a board, not just a diagram
The board knows what it is, and the editor adapts around it:
- The notation is the palette. The Event Storming category opens first and fills the panel, so the eight note kinds are one click away instead of buried behind a dropdown.
- Notes behave like paper. Each kind has a fixed size and a slight tilt, and the text scales to fit rather than the note growing to fit the text. You cannot resize a note, the same way you cannot resize a sticky you have already peeled off the pad.
- Notes are written in marker, in capitals. Type however you like — the board paints it in a marker face, in caps, the way a pen on paper does. It stays readable from across the room and the wall reads as one hand rather than eight. Your typed wording is what is saved, so a note you export or search for keeps the capitals you actually used.
- Dropping a note starts typing. Drag one out and the cursor is already in it — the drag said where and what, so all that is left is the words.
- Right-click offers verbs, not styling. Cut, copy, duplicate, bring to front, send to back, remove. A note's colour, shape and text treatment are the notation, so controls that could only break the grammar are not offered.
Adding a step in the middle
The left-to-right order of the wall is the story: this happened, then that. So when a step turns out to be missing, you should not have to shuffle everything after it by hand.
Start dragging a note, hold it over the gap between two notes, and press Alt (Option on a Mac). The board makes room: everything from that gap onwards slides right to open a slot, and the note you are dragging sits in it. Drop, and the note lands exactly there.
It works two ways round, which is the point:
- A new note from the palette — it lands in the slot, ready to type into.
- A note already on the wall — drag it to where it should have been all along. This is the one you will reach for most.
Press Alt after you have started dragging, not before. Some desktops treat Alt-and-click as "move the window", so a drag that begins with Alt already down never reaches the page.
- Nothing happens unless you press Alt. An ordinary drag is an ordinary drag — drop a note next to a row and nothing else on the board stirs. Let go of Alt mid-drag and the board closes up again, there and then.
- Nothing moves until you drop. The opening slot is a preview. Nobody else sees it and nothing is saved until you let go.
- One undo puts it all back. The note and everything that moved aside are a single step in the history — including where a moved note started out.
- The whole board makes room, not just the row. A command sitting above its event, or a policy below it, moves with the event it belongs to, so the columns stay lined up.
- A moved note leaves its gap behind. The wall opens up where the note is going; where it came from is left as it is, for you to tidy or fill as you like.
- A note you have locked stays put and the board opens around it. Arrows between notes stay attached: one that spans the new note simply stretches.
This only happens on an event storming board, where left-to-right means time, and only for notes — a shape or an icon is dropped where you drop it. On an ordinary diagram, a note dropped in a gap is just a note dropped in a gap.
One wall of paper
The board is a single layer. Every note lands on it, whichever colour it is, so any two notes can be stacked in front of or behind each other and nothing is filed away on a plane you cannot see.
Add your own layers if you want them — an ES board is an ordinary diagram underneath, and the Layers panel works exactly as it does anywhere else.
How a session usually runs
The method works in passes, and the note kinds are named for them:
- Big picture — orange domain events only, past tense, left to right in time order. Arguments about wording are the point; that is where the domain knowledge comes out.
- Process modelling — add the commands that cause events, the actors issuing them, the policies reacting, the read models people decide on, and the external systems the flow touches.
- Software design — add aggregates, the things commands act on, once the story is stable enough to draw boundaries around.
Red hotspots belong at any stage: a conflict, a question, or a risk nobody can resolve in the room.
Nothing in the editor enforces the passes. They are a way of running the session, not a mode you have to switch — the board is one surface throughout, and you can work whichever way the room does.
Everything else still works
An event storming board is a normal diagram with a specialised presentation, so the rest of the product applies unchanged: live presence, comments, exporting the tab, themes, and offline mode. Export a board and import it elsewhere and it arrives still knowing it is a board.
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