Every element on the canvas starts from the floating palette. The palette organises its contents into category tabs so it stays compact however much it holds, and adding an element is usually a single tap.
Picking a category
The palette's tabs (Shapes, Tools, Components, Devices, Icons, and Technology) work as a joined segmented control: click a tab to open its panel, click the active tab again to collapse it, or click another to switch. Only one is open at a time. Shapes is open by default.
- Shapes holds the common nodes: square, circle, diamond, cylinder, parallelogram, hexagon, document, stadium, and more.
- Tools carries the other kinds, including text, arrows, sticky notes, tables, and frames.
- Components drops themed composites like Banner, Hero, and Header, each landing as a group that follows the tab theme.
- Devices offers UI device frames (browser window, monitor, laptop, phone, tablet, smartwatch) for wireframing.
- Icons is a searchable grid of single-colour icons you can drop on the canvas or onto a shape.
- Technology holds full-colour cloud and infrastructure marks for system-architecture diagrams.
Dropping or drawing a shape
The draw-capable tiles (shapes, text, sticky notes, arrows and similar) arm a combined gesture when you click them.
Tap an empty spot on the canvas to drop the element at its natural size on that point.
Or, instead of a single tap, drag out a box and release to create the element at that size.
If a boxed element is already selected when you add another, the new one inherits its width and height, so you can chain together similarly-sized nodes quickly. Circles and diamonds are an exception: they are inherently square, so they snap back to a square using the larger inherited dimension.
You can also drag a tile straight from the palette onto the canvas instead of tapping. As you drag, a translucent preview of the shape follows your cursor at its real size, so you can see exactly where, and how big, it will land before you let go.
Centre-placed elements
A few kinds skip the draw gesture and simply land at the centre of the visible canvas, already selected, so you can drag them where you want. Icons and tables work this way: consecutive adds stack at the same centre point, and the selection moves to the newest one so you can nudge it off or undo without guesswork.
Icons can be added to a shape rather than as standalone elements: drag an icon tile onto a shape, or click an icon while a shape is selected, and it attaches beside that shape's label.
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