Appearance

One icon in the top bar. One panel. Every appearance setting in it, on every screen, signed in or not.

The nine settings

Setting	What it changes
Theme	Light, dark, or follow the system
Colour	The accent and the neutrals around it
Corner radius	How rounded everything is
Density	How much room each row takes
Text size	The whole type scale, not just body text
Typeface	The font the app is set in
Surface style	How panels sit against the page
Motion	Full, or reduced
Pointer	The cursor treatment, where a device has a pointer at all

Applied before the first paint

The settings are read and written to the page before anything renders. There is no flash of the wrong theme while the app boots, because the theme is decided before the app is running.

That is why they are stored in one place and applied from one table rather than being scattered across components. A hard-coded colour or corner radius in a component is invisible to this panel, which is the failure mode the single control exists to prevent.

Motion

Motion never carries meaning. Reduced motion removes animation without removing information.

The setting holds a resolved value rather than the word system, and that detail matters: a bare prefers-reduced-motion media query would beat any setting, so somebody whose operating system asks for reduced motion could not choose full motion in the app. Resolving it once means full means full.

Where it is kept

On the device, not on your account. It survives a reload and a restart, and it is per device by design — the same person may want a dark, dense interface on a laptop and a large, roomy one on a phone.

That does mean a new device starts from the defaults rather than inheriting what you chose elsewhere. There is no account-level sync of appearance today.

Contrast and targets

AA contrast and a 44-pixel minimum touch target are the floors every screen is built to, along with visible focus, full keyboard operation and a layout that holds from 320 to 1920 pixels wide.