Cards and Stars

Filamental can draw your nodes in two ways. Cards are glass panels with the title written on them, and Stars are points of light with the name hanging beneath, set in a dark world of their own.

You can switch between them at any point, as often as you like, and nothing about your work changes when you do. Your notes, connections and positions stay exactly where you left them, because only the drawing changes.

Switching

Open Settings, choose Graph, and pick Cards or Stars under Node style. It changes straight away, and it applies to every project you open.

Which one to use

There's no right answer, and plenty of people go back and forth depending on what they're doing.

Some people find cards easier to work with. Every title is right there on its node, so when you're building, sorting and reading a structure closely, cards can be the clearer view.

Stars look good, which is why we made them, but they're a flourish on top of the work rather than the work itself. The thinking, the connections and the structure you build are what matter, and all of that is the same in either style.

We take the work seriously. There's no rule that says serious has to look boring, though.

What Stars add

A few things only make sense in a dark world, so they appear in the same Graph settings once Stars are on:

• Atmosphere puts a soft cloud of light around each star.
• Connector style draws connections as straight lines or as curves. Sweep bends each line toward its group, Tension shows how stretched a connection is, and Filament adds fine threads around it.
• Flow when presenting sends light along each connection in the direction it points, but only while you're presenting, so the canvas you work on stays still.

While presenting with Stars, the controls along the bottom also carry a Breathe button, and a Flow button when your connectors are curved. Breathe lets each group drift gently out and back, so the connections between them stretch and relax. See Publisher Studio: Presenting.

What stays the same

• Selecting, dragging, connecting, highlighting, Pathfinder and every layout work in both.
• Your background is kept. Stars draw on their own near-black world, and when you switch back to Cards your theme or background image is still there.
• Share links and HTML downloads show whichever style you had on when you shared, so the people you send them to see what you saw. See Publisher Studio: Sharing.

More on the canvas itself in Graph.