Boundless Reader has three appearance layers under the Settings tab: an accent theme, a background style, and an ambient effect. They combine freely, so the same app can look plain on one phone and rather more theatrical on the next. None of it touches the reader canvas. The page stays the page.
Accent themes
Ten accent themes: Boundless, the default, then Nova, Ink, Mono, Reverse, Blossom, Ember, Mint, Royal, and Void.
The accent runs through buttons, highlights, selection states, and the small pieces of colour that tell you what you can tap. Pick a different one and the whole feel of the app shifts without a single thing about the layout changing. Mono and Reverse exist for anyone who wants the interface to get out of the way entirely. There is more on why these three layers exist at all in an earlier post, Nine themes, six washes, and a little weather.
Matching app icons
Each of the ten accents has a matching alternate app icon on iPhone and iPad, chosen from the same area of Settings where you pick the accent. Icon and accent are chosen separately, so a loud accent behind a plain icon is allowed.
Background styles
Six background styles sit behind the interface: Standard, Brand Wash, Aurora, Midnight, Sunset, and Void.
Standard is no wash at all. The other five are animated gradients that move slowly behind your content. Brand Wash is worth knowing before you pick it: it follows whichever accent you have set, so changing the accent changes the wash along with it. The rest keep their own character regardless of accent. Try each one on your own device before settling. A gradient on an OLED phone in a dark room looks nothing like the same gradient in a screenshot.
Text that sits over the bright stops of a wash gets a shared legibility scrim behind it. We did not recolour text per theme, because that would have meant a fresh exception every time a wash was added.
Ambient effects
On top of the wash sits an optional particle field: None, Snow, Rain, Stars, Sakura, or Fireflies. They drift across the interface, slow and sparse, and sit behind the tab chrome rather than over your content. None is the right answer if you want the interface to hold still.
Ambient effects animate the whole time they are on screen. If you are watching battery on a long reading session, turning the effect off is the simplest saving available in the app. If Reduce Motion is on for your device, the app respects it. The animation stops. The colour stays, so a wash still reads as the one you picked, without the movement.
Putting a combination together
A few starting points, none of them rules:
- Quiet and neutral: Mono or Ink accent, Standard background, no ambient effect. Nothing competes with the page.
- Consistent colour: any accent you like paired with Brand Wash, so the background always agrees with the accent, plus the icon that matches it.
- Night reading: one of the darker washes with the effect set to None, so the interface stays calm in a dark room.
- Seasonal: Blossom with Sakura, or a cooler accent with Snow, if you like the app to change with the year.
You can change any of the three layers at any time. None of them touch your library, your history, or where you left off in a chapter.
What appearance settings do not touch
Appearance is presentation and nothing past it. It leaves alone:
- which sources you have installed, covered in Adding sources
- your library, history, and reading positions, covered in Your library
- reader gestures and auto-scroll, covered in Reading
Your choices live in device settings. Signed out, they stay on that one device, so a new phone means picking your combination again. Getting started has the breakdown of what is available on which platform, and new themes and effects get their own write-ups on the blog when they land.