🎨Customizing Your Board

Complete freedom to build for the way your team works.

Design Mode

First thing to know is you must be in Design Mode to access all board editing tools. As the Host you can switch between Design and Meeting mode without affecting participants in an active meeting.

Building a layout

You can build completely custom board layouts with Metro Retro, whether it's for unique retros or complex workshops. The Shape tool, Zone tool, Text tool, and Image tool give you all the basic components needed.

TIP / Use Activity Frames to organise the flow and process of your meetings.

Zones

Zones are the basic 'container' for sticky notes. Most of the retro templates use zones. Zones have the option to override the color of sticky notes inside them. If you set the Zone Colour to 'none' then your sticky notes can be a mix of colours.

Setting different colours for zones allows you to quickly visualize different work/idea areas. You can further customize zones by setting different layout styles.

Use the zone layout options to set structural behaviour for sticky notes.

The shape tool

You can use shapes to build custom layouts, graphics or for general whiteboarding.

Text Tool

Our text tool has pretty robust editing tools, easily set size, alignment, justification, wrapping behaviour and choose from a variety of Google Fonts for your board design.

Add Images or Gifs

You can upload images directly from your computer, or copy & paste from anywhere. You can also link to GIFs, and search through our integrated image library (Pixabay).

Add Gadgets

Gadgets are a great way to bring more fun and interactivity to your meetings.

In the gadgets you will find:

• A music player (Jukebox) - Pick your track and play music to everyone on the board.

• A Timer - set the time for an exercise.

• A Spinner - add your options and hit spin!

• A Counter - the counter counts up and down.

• A Buzzer - pick a sound effect, then hit the buzzer to play it!

TIP / You can customize gadget colours, just select the gadget and use the colour picker.

Express yourself with the Marker

Have some fun and keep things loose with the marker pen tool. Draw some custom visuals for your board or get your participants to have a go, it's a great ice-breaker

Activity Frames

Activity frames are a way to organize different areas of your board. You can use the 'sheep' icon to bring all participants to you or the visible/hidden icon to keep upcoming activities hidden from participants - a great way to lead your team through a custom experience.

Layout design tips

Object Nesting

Objects can be nested inside each other, so that when you move the parent object, everything inside it moves too. Great for more complicated layouts.

Objects have a 'Container' property that controls this - if turned off a shape will not contain any of the objects inside it.

Layer Order

Bring objects to front or back of each other. Right-click an object to access the context menu.

You can also use the keyboard shortcuts: Shift + [ or ], or move one layer up/down with just [ and ].

Rotate objects

Rotate objects by moving your cursor just outside any corner until you see the cursor change to rotation arrows, then click and drag to rotate the object around its central axis. You can also rotate multiple selected objects in the same way. You cannot rotate sticky notes, index cards, groups or tokens.

Undo / Redo

Use Undo & Redo if you make mistakes.

Note - you cannot undo other people's actions because each person's actions are captured separately.

Cloning objects

You can clone objects by selecting them, then press the Alt key and any direction key together. Alternatively, hold the Alt key and drag from the object - a clone will be created.

Copy & paste

You can copy & paste an object or multiple selected objects. The new copy is placed directly on top of the original.

You can also copy & paste across different boards and templates