Appearance Settings - Colors

The Colors settings control your timeline's background theme, the colors its events use, and where each layer's color is applied.

To reach these settings, click the Appearance button above your timeline and open the Colors section.

Background

Timelines are white by default, and you can switch to any of the other themes here. The four themes appear as small preview swatches rather than a named list, in this order: White, Light Gray, Blue, and Midnight. A theme sets the background color, the font color, and the timeline lines together.

For example, here's the default white theme:

The example timeline on the default white theme, with its three layers on a white background

And here's the same timeline with a light gray background:

The same timeline on the light gray theme, where each layer band picks up a gray background

Custom Event Color Palette

Enter a comma-separated list of HTML hex colors, like #1565C0, #1E88E5, #4DD0E1. Each color needs its leading # and three or six hex digits. If any entry doesn't match, the field turns red and the palette isn't applied.

When you enter a new palette, Preceden recolors your existing events in one of two ways:

If your colors look like they mean something (the timeline has a legend, or all of a layer's events share one color while other events use different ones), Preceden swaps each old color for a new one. Your most-used color becomes the first color in the palette, the next most-used becomes the second, and so on, so events that shared a color still share one. Legend colors are updated to match.
Otherwise, Preceden assigns the palette colors in order, layer by layer, starting over at the first color when it reaches the end of the list.

The palette also becomes the Standard Colors row in the color picker, and Preceden usually picks each new event's starting color from it. If you clear the field, new events go back to Preceden's default colors and your existing events keep the colors they have.

Layer Colors

These two settings control where each layer's own color is used:

Apply the layer color to the layer's background

With this on, a layer's color fills the layer's background as well as its name.

For example, here's what it looks like with the layer names at the top:

The same timeline with each layer's color filling its background and the layer names across the top

And here's the same timeline with layer names to the left:

The same timeline with layer names down the left, each name block filled with that layer's own color

Override event color with the layer color

Turn this on to make every event in a layer use that layer's color instead of its own.

For example, here's a timeline with layer names to the left, no layer background color, but overridden event colors:

Layer names down the left over a plain background, with every event taking its layer's color

And here it is again but with the layer color applied to the layer background:

The same timeline with the layer color applied to both the events and the layer background

Misc

Display past events in gray

On a project plan, graying out past events makes it clear at a glance which ones are done. Rather than recoloring each event by hand as it finishes, turn this on and Preceden grays them out for you.

An event counts as past once its end date has gone by (or, for an event with a single date, once that date has), so events that are still underway keep their colors. The gray also takes priority over the layer color override above.

Darken weekends

This option darkens weekends on your timeline to make them stand out. It has no effect at large scales (like years or decades) or very small ones (like minutes).