# Themes and appearance

> Eight hand-built themes, six characters to stand in for Margin, and one dial for the size of every word.

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.

> **On the phone:** The phone has all eight themes, and a theme picked on one device is the
> theme on the other. Its character picker is the Companion page in Settings,
> which also sets quiet hours and how lively the character is allowed to be.

## 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.

> **Side note:** The landing page has its own theme toggle, Daybreak or Moonpool only. It is
> stored apart from the app, so trying a look there never changes your saved
> choice.

**Where to next**

- [Keyboard shortcuts](https://themarginapp.com/docs/keyboard-shortcuts): the other way to make the app fit your hands
- [Your first hour](https://themarginapp.com/docs/your-first-hour): where the theme is first chosen
- [The assistant](https://themarginapp.com/docs/margin-ai): what the character stands in for


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Section: Control and connections. Checked against the running product on October 5, 2026.
Web page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/themes-and-appearance. Every docs page: https://themarginapp.com/docs/llms.txt