The combination of a minimal set of diagram style flags leads to a different look and feel and a large number of possible themes. The diagram option flags discussed here are: Icons (Shape Title Icons, Shape Item Icons, Connector Item Icons), Labels, Simplified, Contrast, Monochrome, Stereotypes and Modifiers, with alternate views offered by transparency and minimized shapes. The default rich theme shows colors, icons, round shapes and text styles. Each such detail provides an immediate visual identification of a metadata object property.
Default Rich Themes
By default, we use shadowed shapes, shape header gradient background colors, shape title and item icons, text styles to show visibility and specific attributes (italic for abstract or surrogates, bold for static, underlined for final/sealed), round shape and connectors corners, dash borders for abstract types etc. Every visual detail is not here for aesthetics, but as a piece of semantic information about metadata:
Monochrome Themes
The Monochrome flag changes all diagram colors (including icons, borders, gradients, text) to just layers of gray. This is a stylish metal-like theme, well suited for those tiered of many colors, but who want more than just plain black and white UML.
We also turned off here the three categories of icons, for Shape Titles, Shape Items and Connector Items. When shape item icons are off, the +/- icons for categories are also hidden, and so these special items should be now expanded or collapsed by double-click.
Simplified Themes
Simplified is a powerful switch, that remove most of the fancy visual styles from a diagram: no round corners at shapes and connectors, no text styles, no dash borders etc. Each shape title appears in bold. Many connectors get an alternate style (for database models, the Crow’s Foot notation appears instead).
The Labels switch is unchecked, which hides all connector items from the diagram. And we have also turned all icons off, and show shape Stereotypes (if any).
UML Themes
Original UML means simplicity, with a black and white theme, obtained by the combination of options Simplified and Monochrome. We show Modifiers instead of Stereotypes: shape modifiers appear as full keywords just below the shape title; item modifiers are +/#/- UML prefixes for public/protected/private etc.
We also turned Contrast on here, so the shapes appear filled with a light gray, instead of being plain white. What Contrast does to any theme is switching the diagram’s Editor background color with the background color of the shapes, so diagram’s background becomes lighter (white) and each shape’s background darker (gray). Diagram’s background will always be white on printed images, so only the shape body color changed.
Transparent Themes
We could use transparency to create an alternate very simple theme for the whole diagram, by manually selecting and making all shapes transparent:
Minimized Themes
There are cases where we want to focus on the topology. Where the connections, links and transformations are what matter most, like in object scenarios. The pseudo-theme below has been obtained by selecting and minimizing all shapes but SocketInformationOptions from the default rich theme diagram, with no Connector Item Icons:
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