Themes and Appearance
Two different questions live in this app, kept apart:
How the app looks to you — the theme, the background, the editing paper, the interface scale. That is this page, and none of it reaches the presenter.
What the presenter sees — typeface, size, weight, margin, colors, edge dimming. That is the Settings panel, and it travels inside the project.
The first belongs to the machine you are sitting at. Sending a .valendo to a colleague never changes the app they open it in.
Twenty themes
Ctrl+Shift+P, or the palette button in the header — beside the interface-scale control, because those two answer the same question.
Ten dark and ten light, split by a tab, in a two-by-five grid — so you compare palettes by seeing them together.
| Dark | Console · High Contrast · Canyon · Space · Forest · Ocean · Wine · Marble · Neon · Aurora |
| Light | the same ten names, rebuilt for a light room |
Console is the app as it has always looked, and High Contrast is its opposite. The panel opens on the mode you are already in, with your current theme marked.
The background
Eighteen of the twenty carry their own artwork, drawn behind the chrome and nowhere else: the script editor, the Broadcast panel and the presenter's screen stay opaque in every theme.
A texture behind the text you type during a live show makes typing harder, and a Broadcast preview that lies about its own background stops being useful for the one thing it exists to do — check what is going out.
The slider decides how much comes through. At 0 the app is exactly what it was before themes existed. As you come down, the artwork fades and desaturates together, so a dimmed background never keeps a color cast that tints the tiny labels sitting on it.
Choose image… points it at a file of your own, copied into the app so it travels with the machine.
Editing paper
Having chosen the desk, do you want the text you type to match it or to contrast with it?
It runs from the near-black the editor has always used up to a paper gray. The middle is where the good answers are — a charcoal around 15, a light gray around 80. The ink flips from white to black partway along, and the live swatch shows the real paper and the real ink.
One thing to know if you go far up the scale: presenter colors do not move with the paper. They are chosen against a dark chrome, and a light green picked there is hard to read on light paper. Either keep the paper dark, or pick presenter colors with the contrast filter on (see Presenters).
Light mode is gray, not white
An operator sits in a dim room facing this screen for hours, and a white panel there is a flash in the face. The whole light set is built downward from a gray ceiling, and the artwork for the light themes is dark enough that the small labels stay legible.
The guard on the state colors
Themes may change green (rolling), red (on air) and amber (attention) — without that, a genuine high-contrast theme would be impossible. A palette in which those three stop being distinguishable does not ship: separation is measured on lightness, not hue, so the three stay apart even for someone who does not separate green from red.
Typefaces
Ten typefaces travel inside the app, so the choice draws identically on Windows and on macOS — Inter, Cascadia Mono, JetBrains Mono, iA Writer Quattro, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, Lexend, IBM Plex Sans, Literata, Newsreader, Alegreya.
Each name in the list is set in its own face — something the system's own dropdown cannot do. The editor and the presenter's screen keep separate lists: what is comfortable to type in for two hours is not what reads at three meters on a mirrored glass.
The live sample
The strip above the output's type controls draws the font's own name in the real colors of the output, at the real weight and ALL CAPS setting, redrawing while you drag the slider. The Settings panel is gray on gray and the presenter's screen is white on black, and a weight judged in the panel's light is a weight judged wrong.
Presets
A whole set of output settings saved to one of eight slots and brought back with a click: the studio look, the church look, the outdoor-in-daylight look.
Each slot takes a name and a color, and one can be starred as the one a new script starts from.
Interface scale
Ctrl+Alt+= and Ctrl+Alt+-, or the control in the header, scale the whole console — keys, labels, panels — not just text, and it is remembered per machine. It is on Ctrl+Alt because the plain Ctrl+= already belongs to the presenter's type size.
The theme, the background, its strength and the editing paper live in the machine's own settings file, next to the interface scale — not in the workspace and not in the project. That is what makes the window open already wearing the theme, with no flash.