Board Studio: make the board yours

Board Studio is a right-hand drawer that controls how a board looks and feels, with seven sections in order: Overview, Theme, Columns, Cards, Effects, External View and Saved Views. Open it from the board menu (under Design), or during board creation via the Customise (Board Studio) disclosure.

Edits are a live preview until you commit them. The drawer's sticky footer has three buttons: Reset to default (with a confirm dialog, “Reset board appearance?”), Discard changes and Apply.

Theme

The Theme tab sets the board's overall look: a theme preset, a Background style (Plain / Gradient / Grid / Frosted), an Accent colour (swatches or a hex value), Density (Compact / Normal / Spacious), Motion (Full / Reduced / None) and Font scale (Small / Default / Large).

Six theme presets ship with Laya: Laya Default, Linear Clean, Enterprise Calm, Delivery Command, Startup Energy and Client Portal.

Cards

The Cards tab controls what a card shows and how it behaves: a layout preset (Compact / Normal / Spacious), per-field visibility toggles for all eleven card fields, a priority style (Bars / Dot / Label), a source badge style (Pill / Icon / Hidden), done-card and blocked-card styles (Normal / Highlight / Strikethrough / Fade), a cap on visible assignees and tags, and eight hover styles from Classic lift to Tint + rail + ring.

Columns

The Columns tab styles each column individually: accent colour, background tint, icon, description, WIP limit, count and WIP visibility, collapsed state, an on-enter effect override, a per-column GIF, and whether the column is visible in the external share view.

Effects

Effects celebrate movement. Under Per-transition effects you choose what plays when a card enters each stage — Move to Done, Move to Blocked, Move to In Review and Move to In Progress — from five options: None, Glow, Pulse, Confetti and GIF. A column can override the default or keep Inherit (Effects tab). An intensity setting (Subtle / Standard / Lively) controls how energetic effects feel across the whole board.

The GIF effect uses a built-in GIF search with trending suggestions; the chosen GIF plays centre-screen when a card enters the column. An affordances section adds Toast on completion — a brief, accessible success toast when a card reaches Done. Sound is shown with a “Coming soon” badge and does not play audio yet.

External View

The External View tab controls the public, read-only version of the board — the Public link toggle, which fields to hide, a separate public theme and accent colour, a custom title, a progress summary and a watermark. It has its own article: Sharing boards publicly.

Saved Views (appearance presets)

Board Studio's Saved Views tab captures the current look as a reusable preset — appearance, card and effects settings, never your items or columns. It ships five starter views (Engineering View, Stakeholder View, Sprint Planning View, Review View, Compact View) and five board templates (Software Sprint Board, Client Delivery Board, Kanban Delivery Board, QA Review Board, Launch Tracker). Templates restyle the board — they never change your columns or issues.

Where the structural settings live

Board Studio is about appearance. Structural configuration lives in Board settings (the board menu → Settings), organised as Setup (General, Issue types, Statuses & columns, Tags & labels), Layout & flow (Card layout, Workflow, Effort scale), Connect & share (Integrations, Status mapping, Email inbox, Sharing) and Danger zone (Clone & archive).