Themes and appearance
Eight hand-built themes, six characters to stand in for Margin, and one dial for the size of every word.
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Everything on this page lives in Settings→Appearance, which has two tabs: Theme and Character.
The eight themes#
Four are light and four are dark. You start on Daybreak.
| Theme | Light or dark | What it looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Daybreak | Light | Warm paper, copper ink and soft morning light |
| Shorelight | Light | Sea-mist white and deep slate ink, with sea-glass light |
| Matinee | Light | A 1984 beige-box computer: aged plastic, phosphor orange, terminal type, faint scanlines |
| Atelier | Light | Porcelain gallery light, graphite ink and a single vermilion accent |
| Moonpool | Dark | Moonlit glass over deep slate water, in silver-periwinkle |
| Midnight Library | Dark | Candlelight, film grain, leather and wood |
| Abyssal Calm | Dark | The deep ocean: bioluminescent glow, caustic light, drifting particles |
| VOID_SIGNAL | Dark | A glitching CRT: scan lines, color fringing, corrupted data |
A theme sets more than color. Most also bring their own typefaces, motion and texture, which is why switching feels like walking into a different room. No screen ships until it works in all eight.
The same themes live in the welcome's "pick a look" step. The choice is saved to your account and follows you to your other devices. It is applied before the page first draws, so there is no flash of the wrong theme on load.
Text size#
Under the themes, one slider scales every word and control in the app together, the way browser zoom does, without changing the layout's proportions. It moves in steps: 85, 100 (the designed size), 110, 125, 140 and 160 percent.
It syncs across your devices like the theme, and it is also in the menu under your picture, where you can nudge it up or down a step.
The character#
The Character tab picks who Margin looks like: the small drawn figure on the assistant's launcher, in the header while it works, and on empty pages. The assistant is the same whichever you choose. This is about who you would rather share a desk with.
The six characters
- Jot
- an ink face with dot eyes and a comma nose. The default.
- Niblet
- a compact ink body on a split nib, which strains under weight.
- Whorl
- a fingerprint field that reorganizes around two breathing gaps.
- Tare
- a bar balanced on a wedge, never quite level.
- Simmer
- a low body whose top edge rises and bubbles.
- Vesper
- a drop of ink hanging by its own neck.
The previews all play the same working day at once (thinking, looking things up, done, stuck, asleep) so you can compare the same moment played by six bodies. Hover one and it looks back at you. Your pick syncs across devices.
Reduced motion#
The app follows your system's reduced-motion setting: entrances settle at once, looping animations hold still, and the character previews stop on their first pose. If motion feels heavy on an older machine, that system switch is the control to use.