Grouping ideas with Areas

Areas let you group related bubbles together on the canvas — perfect for organizing a brainstorm into themes, sorting sticky notes in an affinity map, or sectioning off part of a larger mind map. An area is a labeled, colored box that sits behind your bubbles; move it, and everything inside comes along.

Creating an area

There are three ways to add an area, depending on what you already have on the canvas.

Draw one anywhere

Open the Mind Map menu in the toolbar and choose Draw area… Your cursor becomes a crosshair.
Click and drag to draw the area at the size you want — or a single click drops an area at the default size.

Changed your mind? Press Esc (or the cancel button) to leave draw mode without adding anything.

Add one at a specific spot

Right-click an empty part of the canvas and choose Add area here. A dashed outline previews where it will land before you commit.

Wrap it around existing bubbles

Select the bubbles you want to group, right-click one of them, and choose Create area around selection. The new area is sized to enclose everything you selected.

Moving and resizing

Move: drag the area by its title bar. Any bubbles fully inside the area move with it, and so do areas nested within it.
Resize: hover the area and drag any edge or corner handle.

Renaming an area

There are three ways to rename an area:

Double-click the title bar, or
Click the pencil to the left of the title bar, or
Right-click the area and select 'Rename area'.

Press Enter to save, or Esc to cancel.

Changing an area's color

Right-click the area and choose "Area color…" then select any swatch. New areas are automatically given a color from a rotating palette, so adjacent areas are easy to tell apart.

To go back to the color the area started with, open the color picker and click the Default swatch.

Deleting an area

Right-click the area and choose Delete area — or click the area to select it and press Delete (or Backspace). Deleting an area removes only the box and its label; the bubbles inside it stay on the canvas.

Tips

Areas sit behind your bubbles, so you can freely drag bubbles in and out of them.
Moving an area is the fastest way to reposition a whole group of bubbles at once.
Use color to signal meaning — for example, one color per category in an affinity map.