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Windows: In this video, I'd like to show you how to make your topics look great
One way to make your Mind Maps look interesting is by using the Automatic Coloring. You can
choose from one of the default settings, or open the advanced settings to make finer grained
alterations, like setting the rainbow coloring angle, saturation and brightness, or using
the alternating rainbow coloring to ensure contrast between the topic colors.
To make it more interesting, or if you want to convey different ideas for different topic
relationships, you can change the connection type as well.
The basic topic shapes give you some flexibility of choice of topic shape, but it is often
worthwhile to open up the advanced settings, and use the detailed shape settings for things
such as rounded rectangles and chamfered rectangle shapes, because you can alter the look of
the topics significantly using different corner amounts.
You can style the shapes in different ways using the gallery of shape styles which are
generated based on the themed colors and other style settings. This is just a convenient
means of setting a number of options all at once to give an aesthetically pleasing result.
If you want to have finer grained control though, you can use the settings for the fill
color and line color. We recommend you stick with the themed colors where possible so you
can change to a different color set, and it will still look good.
However, if you want to take control with custom coloring, you can use the color chooser,
which lets you both choose any color and shade, and adjust the transparency to create some
interesting effects. You can also use the red, green, blue, and alpha sliders to pick
a color, or enter values in the range 0 to 255 if you know the exact color values you
need.
To make the topics look more interesting, you can either drag on images directly from
the file explorer, or you can use the built in media library.
We do provide a a huge number of images for you to use from within the NovaMind media
library, and we will be adding to the number of libraries available for download over time,
but to get started, you should download the Initial Library. This is quite a large file,
containing over 3,000 images, so it will probably take a few minutes to download, but once you
have started the download, you can carry on your Mind Mapping, while it completes the
download and installs itself in the background.
You will see that there are two categories of images there: Adornments and Images. The
adornments are special images that will automatically go on the left end of the topic, and are used
as visual indicators of a particular meaning. You can have as many adornments on a topic
as you like - just drag them on, and drag them to reorder them. To remove an adornment,
just drag it off the topic.
If you want to move an adornment from one topic to another, just drag it on to the other
topic. If you want to copy an adornment on to another topic while leaving a the original
where it was, hold the Ctrl key down while dragging the adornment. You can even use this
method while dragging on to the same topic to make a copy of the adornment on the same
topic.
To find images to put on your topics, you can type a keyword in to the media library
search field. We have tried to tag the images in as many ways as possible, so you can find
them by color, by emotion, by usage, by type of image, and other relevant keywords. For
instance you could search for "green" and find all the green objects, or "happy", or
"cartoon", or "photo". But if you are not sure what to search for, you also have the
option of just browsing the images, or just a subset by selecting the categories you are
interested in.
The Images can be dragged on to the topics, and you can have up to four images on each
topic. Just drag an image on and drop it in the quadrant you want it. If there was already
an image in that position, it will be replaced with the new one. If you want to move an image
to another topic or another quadrant of the same topic, just click it to select it, and
drag it to where you want it. If you want to copy it instead of moving it, hold the
Ctrl key down while you drag it.
You can resize the image by dragging the two edges that have resize handles on them, so
you can adjust it in relation to the edge of the topic or relative to the text. When
you first add an image, it will be scaled to fit the space that you have available for
it, but if you right click the image, you will see the options for scaling it to fill
the available space, or stretching to fill the space.
Normally, the program will impose a minimum size on images so they are easily visible,
so if you want to do something like create a bordered topic with an image at the top
and bottom, then you would need to start with an image that is small in that dimension already.
For instance, if I wanted to format a topic so it had a top and bottom border, I would
select an image that was already the height I wanted, put it on the top and bottom of
the topic, and then tell it to stretch to fill the space available.
If you want to delete an image from a topic, just select the image so that the image resizing
handles are showing, and press the delete key.
You can resize your topics by dragging the resize handles. Once you have resized a topic,
you will see lock icons that indicate that you have locked their size and are not using
the automatic sizing for the topic any more. If you want to revert to automatic sizing,
click the lock icon to unlock it again.