Customizing the look

Draw My Tree gives you a lot of dials, and they all live in one place: the Appearance panel on the rail. It opens with the preset gallery at the top, then the visual settings below: layout, generations, edges, cards, typography, and the canvas. Open the Appearance panel from the rail to follow along.

Use the Reset button at the bottom of the panel to start over.

Presets

At the top of the Appearance panel:

The preset gallery lets you save the current look as a named preset and apply it again later; handy if you switch between a print style and a screen style, or keep a consistent look across trees. Apply a saved preset with a click, or delete one you no longer want.

Everything from here down lives in the same panel, below the presets.

Layout

Orientation controls which way generations flow:

Vertical: older generations at the top, descendants below. Best for printable trees.
Horizontal: older on the left, descendants to the right. Works better for wide screens and trees with lots of generations.

Spacing X and Spacing Y control how far apart cards sit. Presets cover Compact, Balanced, and Spacious; or set custom pixel values with the sliders if you need to.

Auto-collapse distant branches hides far-away parts of the tree to keep the canvas readable. The depth slider controls "how far is too far", counted in relationship steps out from the person the tree is centred on. What is left re-flows into a compact tree rather than keeping the gaps where the hidden branches used to be. Useful in large trees; turn off if you want everything visible.

Distance is counted person to person, so it can fall between two parents of the same child: if a child is inside the depth but one of its parents is only reachable through that child, the parent is hidden and the child stays, still joined to the parent who remained.

Two more toggles control what gets drawn at all: Hide isolated nodes drops people with no relationships, and Show placeholder spouses draws a stand-in card for a partner you haven't added yet.

Generations

Show overlay turns the generation overlay on or off. Everything below it styles that overlay, so the rest of the group only appears once the overlay is on — with it off there is nothing on the canvas for those controls to change:

Band opacity fades the overlay in and out.
Band style controls the stripes behind each generation: Dashed lines, Alternating fill, Lines + fill, or Labels only.
Label format sets how each generation is labelled: full ("Generation 3"), short, a plain number, or Roman numerals.
Band color, Label color, and Label halo tint the overlay. Leave any of them empty to keep the automatic tone.
Show dates adds the date range each generation spans to its label.

Edges (the lines between people)

Opacity and thickness are self-explanatory.
Color picks the line color. Leave it empty to keep the neutral default tone.
Corner radius rounds the bends. Higher values look softer; lower values look more like a circuit diagram.

Marriage ticks (the small marks on partner links) can take a distinct marriage style and a separate marriage color so couples stand out from parent–child links. Hide marriage ticks removes them entirely, as does setting the marriage node shape to None.

Person cards

Cards are the small rectangles representing each person. You control:

Card shape: rounded rectangle, rectangle, or pill.
Person node radius: corner roundness, separate from the edges.
Girls color and Boys color: the accent colors used on each card.
Card accent decides where that accent shows: a stripe across the top of the card, the border around the whole card, or none. Note that the border option and Hide card border cancel each other out — the panel says so when you pick both — because the accent border is the outline the toggle removes.
Hide card border, Double-rule border, and Transparent cards: tweaks to the card outline and fill for a flatter or framed look. All three hold at every zoom level, including the initials-only cards you get when you zoom far out.
Family nodes: the small diamond junctions between parents who share children. Off makes the tree cleaner; on makes the relationship structure explicit.

What shows on a card

Name format: first-last, last-first, or surname in caps. Surname particles travel with the surname, so "Vincent van Gogh" reads as "van Gogh, Vincent" and "VAN GOGH Vincent" rather than splitting "van" off into the given names.
Date format: year only, month and year, full date, or lifespan (a birth–death range like 1928 – 2011).
Toggles to hide birth/death dates entirely (handy if the visual is what matters and the details live in the panel).
Hide photo if you want a name-only card.

Photos

Photo shape: rectangle or circle.
Placeholder image radius when there's no portrait.

Typography

Font family: serif, sans-serif, display, slab, or mono. Try a few; the canvas updates immediately.
Scale: Small, Default, or Large text.
Name weight: regular, bold, or small caps.

Canvas

Background color lets you pick any color behind the tree.
Pattern layers a subtle pattern on top of the background: dots, crosses, grid, paper specks, blueprint, tea-stained manuscript, or none.
Pattern opacity controls how strong the pattern is.

Blueprint pattern on a navy background is a popular pick for sharing.

Resetting

The Reset button at the bottom of the panel returns everything to defaults. It doesn't touch your tree data, only the visual settings.

Exporting a different look

You don't have to change the tree on screen to change how it exports. The Export panel has its own Look dropdown: leave it on Current look to export what you see, or pick a preset to re-theme the export and its preview only. Colors, fonts, borders, card shape, name format, edges, the generation overlay, and the background all follow the preset you pick.

Six settings stay with the tree on screen rather than following the preset: card layout, hide photo, card size, date format, hide birth date, and hide death date. Those six decide the shape of the card box the layout was measured against (the date settings by changing how many date rows a card has), and a themed export reuses those positions, so taking them from a preset would draw a re-planned card into a box that isn't the right shape for it.

Accessibility

The whole interface scales with the text size setting, separately from anything a tree's own look does — opening someone else's tree never changes how the app looks for you.

If your system is set to reduce motion, Draw My Tree drops the decorative movement: cards stop growing under the pointer, and the tree's entrance animation is skipped. Everything the motion signalled is still signalled — a hovered card recolors its border either way.