Shadows as style option for graphical elements


Hi miro team,

my wish is to create graphical elements (arrows, rectangles, etc.) with a shadow as an option.

Best regards

Tobias

This would be awesome!  I’d take it a step further and add an option for color shadowing of any object to a board; including text!


@Tobias Maier Thank you for sharing this wish list request. Can you help me understand what you would use the shadows for? 

@The One and Only SK Also curious to understand what differently coloured drop shadows would allow you to accomplish. 


Shadows would be nice!

@Fabian Strunden I would use them mainly for shapes. Sometimes you want something to “elevate”, so to speak, to create a certain 3D effect. As a workaround I duplicate the shape, give it a dark color, place it behind the original shape, and offset it a little bit. 😊


Absolutely, custom drop shadow for photos, stickies, shapes, and text would be amazing!
Really a necessity, I would say… since some colors don’t stand out well against the canvas.
 

 


I just came here to suggest the same thing!   See below an example use-case (where the shadow is, of course, a duplicate sent to back and darkened).  I would love to use shadows to help elevate/highlight/segregate elements too!    Thanks for considering,   James

Without:

With:

 


@James Intriligator Thank you for sharing the screenshots. May I ask why you used a shape instead of a Sticky Note in this case? Sticky Notes already have drop shadows. 🙏 


@Fabian Strunden Sticky Notes are not rotatable and a free colorizing is also missing. 


Hi!  I dont tend to use Sticky Notes often -- too little (almost no!) control of text look/style/size, inability to rotate (as @mlanders notes), etc.  I always use a little rectangle as my form of sticky note.  And, the rotation (just like my desired shadow effects) helps make the (faux) sticky note POP from the background…. Thanks!


I would want to add shadows to elements like rectangles, circles, etc. to achieve a “card” look like in the screenshot below. In this case the intention is to contain screenshots in graphic elements that share the same affordances as having a mobile phone mock up behind the screenshot.

 

 

Having these capabilities would also make it easier to quickly wireframe layered UI elements, like cards.


Here’s my case for drop shadows:

 

I often create screenshot collages for sample illustration.
I prefer partially stacking such images so that they take up less space and look more natural.

I am now putting hard borders around since drop shadow is unavailable, and fairly put, it’s ugly:

 


@Fabian Strunden Adding to the conversation here to say that shadows would help with wireframing. Right now, it’s not easy to depict modals/overlay. For example, when you select Quiz 3, an overlay should appear with more details. The best I can do, is create a rectangle for the overlay, increase the border thickness, and cover the parts of the border I want to hide with white rectangles in order to create the illusion of a shadow.

 


I’ve only just come to Miro, and to be honest I was very confused that you can’t add shadows to shapes. I will do it manually, but this should be a feature in my opinion. My company wants to create its org chart in Miro, and split the whole structure up into frames for different levels. We obviously want it to look nice, and have a picture of each partner but be much easier to update (I did the last one in Illustrator). I would like to add a shadow to each ‘card’ for each person and can’t do that. This may affect whether we use Miro for this use case. We want to do something like below:

 


Further to my previous comment: I managed to achieve a nice effect in Miro for what I wanted, but I had to hide a sticky note behind my red rectangles to get the business card look I need. It would be nice to do this, and also rotate the shadow, increase blur etc to get the necessary effect for future projects. I know Miro is not a graphics tool, but for many use cases I think a shadow is necessary and useful.