Can I add more color label options to organize my cards?

This is absolutely the most ridiculous thing I've encountered in years. Here we are in 2018 and people are asking for more colors? Are you serious? And then I read a blog post stating "We haven't forgotten those who are visually inclined - we've added 5 more colors!"

5 more colors! Wow! How amazing! Thank you so much! 5 colors!

How many decades now have color pickers been around, how many millions of colors do we have on each screen?

Absolutely ridiculous. Atlassian - maybe you should have your team google the search term "color picker" and join the rest of us in the 2010s.

What an embarrassment.

UPDATE: It's now the 2020s.

Tony Sansico

Unfortunately, I couldn't agree more

Laura Zielke

Definitely need more colors! Or if we can't have that, then patterns with existing colors. I need more labels.

Jeremy A.

agreed.

LanceTrahan

That's a really good workaround. Though any users you have for that board may want to make an account specifically for that board so that any other boards they may be using aren't influenced by the profile pic change.

Although I appreciate the suggestion, frankly I think it's about time that users STOP working around what amounts to neglect and stupidity on the part of developers. We should not be investing our time in something that this developer is apparently too stupid or too uncaring to implement. Frankly I think they're attempting to manipulate their customers with the lack of colors, because it's tough to rationalize how people who design such a piece of software are THAT stupid and incompetent.

There is absolutely NO good reason users should not be able to choose any color they want in 2018. Period. It's time to stop allowing them to shrug their neglect onto the users shoulders where they can get people doing work for them for free that they should be competent enough to do in the first place.

The best thing for all of us to do is trash Trello and Atlassian and support companies that are not filled with either morons or outright assholes.

Jochen Rieger

We definitely need the possibility to chose more colours / shades, especially when working with custom fields.

Eg. a field estimation / story points: I'd ideally be able to use different shades of one colour.

Let's say, for example, three shades of blue for the three categories of estimation. Three shades of green for priority, and so on.

The current – very limited – colour palette enforces you more or less to use red, yellow and orange at some point. Although I'd really like to reserve those very intense signal colours for, well, maybe priority or other important labels such as "blocker", "critical issue", etc.

Please, Atlassian, why not add a simple hex code input field? That would help a lot, already.

2077

agreed, too.

unknown

+1 colours for labels!

Dbsk Dbsk

+10000 for label color, it's so bad label compare to github and gitlab, jira likes in 90's year web page style, only the original simple label

Richard Osborne_7vu11x

+10 (purely as there is 10 of us here and we all want label colours)

Gregory Van Riper

Our development team has been looking for boards to utilize and some shortcomings are deal breakers such as this. Some things your team should really sit down and develop:

Color picker for custom label colors.
Global label names/settings. Why should we setup labels per each board?

These seem like doable things and a request that has been going on for over a year. Is there any plan to add this?

Jochen Rieger

A huge +1 also for the global naming. At least per team, or so, would be great.

Gregory Van Riper

Maybe a hierarchy?

Global>Teams>Board?

jhawkinsatetech

Agree! We would really love to see global labels for teams as well.

We currently accomplish something similar by having "template" boards with appropriate labels already set up. Each new project board we create is a copied fork of one of those templates.

Thats a rather fiddly work-around, and having proper globally-managed labels would be very welcome. (Side note: having proper board template support would be nice too!)

Chance Lockwood-Mawson

I've just gone googling for an answer or powerup for more label colours and sadly have ended up here.

I'm sorry, are you from the past?

I've joined this community just to add my voice here +1 for infinite colour labels - 'karn Atlassian/Trello, it ain't 1999 any more...

Please respect all those that have posted here with an update on your resolve to fix this issue (that isn't a workaround, gosh knows I've been doing them for years already...).

Wonder how many others read here, never posted and just switched platforms?

Thanks.

Morgan Benjamin

Yeah, whatever reasoning there is for a limited color swatch might work, at a minimum, for the default Trello.

Yet, not allowing i.e. a free add-on to select label colors, esp when you've now added unlimited labels, really contradicts your own workflow logic (and obviously irks more than a few, myself included). Your labels ARE colors, the title doesn't even show on the card - how are people supposed to effectively organise in the workflow Trello themselves are proposing, without a customisable pallete!?

Also, for a minimum of colors, as mentioned above, this material swatch makes much more sense, at a minimum: https://getmdl.io/customize/index.html

I could not agree more. How on earth would adding more colors (or the ability to add custom colors – my company would love to be able to use the same colors we use internally for other efforts) affect the software in absolutely any way?? There is no known security or resource-use reason that colors could not be unlimited, especially if unlimited labels per card are already a thing. The colors produced would add no problems whatsoever. It's quite bizarre that this is even an issue. Is there an official Jira issue where I can vote for this essential feature?

I find myself trying to think of technical or business reasons they might have made this decision. This is one that might actually have a technical basis: a limited colour palette (say 16 colours) can be represented at a database level in maybe a bytes worth of storage, vs an rgb hex value which is 3 bytes. That might seem trivial, but over a couple of trillion records it adds up significantly.

I’m in no way saying it’s right, but once again trying to figure out their rationale for not implementing this...

This *could* be a thing if they already didn't make it so that you can create and use an unlimited number of labels per card, with 8 bits per character of text and graphically represented color bars that are way larger in their file size per element than simply representing a color on the screen. This potentially makes each card how large?? The color itself becomes irrelevant, completely lost in the weight/size and bandwidth required by implementation of the graphical elements. And by them telling us that we can have "unlimited" labels per card, this tells me that none of these things are concerns for them. What we are talking about then, is simply allowing representation of more colors, which ends up a drop in the ocean compared to the rest.

I like to believe that the reason I play devil's advocate is so that when an Atlassian employee finally reads this thread all of their objections will have neatly been dealt with.

In reality, as soon as I clicked "submit" on this one it occurred to me how fallacious it was

I want to point out, by the way, that Microsoft Planner - which I'm forced to use for certain work projects - gives me 6 predefined colours which I can name. 6 colours. No options. So... kudos to Trello for the small upgrade I guess?

Okay, this is a dumb 5-second workaround, that - unless someone wants to build a powerup - only works on the web version and requires TamperMonkey or GreaseMonkey.

Basically if you add [#rrggbb] hex codes to the end of any label, this script will apply the colour and then rewrite the label.

Edit: v4, fixed the labels for opened cards, fixed a couple of warnings that were coming up in Tampermonkey due to undeclared variables and lazy programming by me. Chrome seems to try and run the userscript before the cards are displayed, added 1s delay.

// ==UserScript==
// @name Trello Unlimited Label Colours
// @version 0.4
// @description Applies hex codes embedded in trello labels to the label itself.
// @include *//trello.com/*
// @Grant none
// @Run-at document-idle
// ==/UserScript==

Matt, this is awesome. My only question then is: will anyone else be able to see the new colors without Tampermonkey or Greasemonkey?

No, unfortunately. They'll be able to see the hex code at the end of the label, but it'll show the original colour you selected for that label. I wouldn't suggest this is a good solution for a team environment or for use in production, unless someone wants to have a crack at turning it into a power-up.

Edit: just realised this also doesn't work when you click on a card to open it. *sigh*. Will try and come up with a v2 if I get a moment.

As @Ben David pointed out above: we shouldn't have to work around issues like this. This post is trending, and it's in the top 5 viewed ones on the Trello community, so hopefully we're slowly getting attention from the devs... maybe one of them will chime in one of these days. @Mike you mentioned talking to the team above... did anything come from this?

That's great. I have a team of 3 in my dept and we can all add the userscript, so for us it's not an issue. I am, unfortunately, experiencing an error with the userscript in Tampermonkey, however:

Any thoughts?

Aha! believes there is a need and has implemented it:

Aha Color Offering.png

I can build my entire product lines out in the colors that Sales Enablement prefers, and the tasks that will get assigned, as well. This clearly can be done for very complicated product and task management programs. This has become silly; there is clearly no excuse except that Atlassian just isn't feeling it right now.

Last week, ClickUp announced color labels and custom colors.

Obviously it matters to people.

Monday also allows custom colors.

Monday color picker.png

/+3

Something Atlassian does not understand with their cloud products: people CARE about branding. Using our own colors matters a great deal to us. It's also really hard to encourage our staff to use our internal color systems and then *also* a separate external system that has all different and repeating colors. Maybe in the early 2000s, but today it is not necessary, and should be trivial to implement.

Morgan Benjamin

@Mike how can you be confident this isn't desired by the majority of your user base?
Who exactly is requesting what in your current list of priorities?
Where do these requests come from?
Is this list, and priorities representative of the majority of your users?
How do you define priorities?

Respectfully, that this remains as it is, not even in a factored somewhere-near list of priorities, seems an overt miscalculation, and a classic case of only looking for answers to questions you posed yourselves, within the box you work.

I just noticed that this is now the single highest liked (and still third-highest viewed) question on the Trello board. Surely this is something that's being looked at by now?

Jovan Jancev_2mhg6m

You can not. But you can add granularity by combining labels with custom fields.

Screen Shot 2019-06-07 at 03.37.26.png

Hi @Jovan Jancev

This discussion's been going a while, and it seems that this answer comes up often. The problem is, for a majority of use cases, it's not enough. The consensus of those of us asking for this is that while we get that we can use Labels - and you can even add Emoji to add a bit of colour - it's not got the at-a-glance functionality or communicability, not to mention the personalisation factor, of having more than a set palette of reusable colours.

Matteo Tramet

absolutely agree...

@Garrett @Teddy @Mike @matt @Blair

Sorry to tag you all, but the lack of response on this highly requested issue is ridiculous. Is an update to address this issue being discussed? We'd just like some transparency please.

Mike_kuzrt1

Hi there,

I've tried to be transparent this whole time that this isn't a priority for the team, and it's not something that we're working on. We hear you that this is highly requested, but the team already has a roadmap defined for the short term, and as I've suggested, overall, this is not very highly requested.

I can offer, as I always have, that I will continue to pass the request on to the team, but it's not something we're planning to work on right now.

Morgan Benjamin

@Mike I understand that you're just the messenger, yes you have been transparent that (and it's painfully evident) that the team doesn't care about this issue.

Yet it seems to me that the key issue here is not that there's no transparency, but that the passionate, very vocal (and what you claim is a minority of) users here* don't find that position acceptable. It's clearly making people look to other platforms, and if that doesn't make you take notice, I don't know what will.

* I think we all believe that we aren't actually a minority, and that this thread points more to something objectively wrong with your factoring.

The current – very limited – colour palette enforces you more or less to use red, yellow and orange at some point. Although I'd really like to reserve those very intense signal colours for, well, maybe priority or other important labels such as "blocker", "critical issue", etc.

I'm having the same problem. We use a five-level priority system using the Custom Fields power-up. 1 through 3 have no color, 4 (high) has orange, and 5 (critical) has red. I should be able to tell my teammates "if you see the color red, it's really important", because it's either a critical item or a Trello notification. But because I have so few label colors to choose from, one of my labels has to be red. As a result, important things get missed because the color red doesn't carry the weight that it should.

#atlassian-knows-best

From Trello's own blog post announcing the Nachos Design System:

blog-colorgraphic (2)-1.jpg

Trello has already solved the color palette problem in the design world. Let's see them carry it through to where it actually matters: the UX world.

Is this a joke?

No joke. These colors are there in their site CSS, but we can't use them in our labels.

#atlassian-knows-best

I see, thanks for clarifying.

Gina Anderson

I just wanted to add that I'm a new user that went searching on how to get more colors for the labels and ended up here. Count me in, I would like more colors or the ability to pick my own. I really couldn't fathom why this wasn't already available, I thought I had to be missing something.

I'm really starting to doubt if our company paying for Trello is worth the investment when there are other options out there that do what we need (GitHub project boards, Azure Boards, Monday, just to name a few). This asinine limitation has become a blocker costing us real time, and therefore money. Instead of giving us reasonable options for our label colors, Atlassian has decided on behalf of their paying customers that they actually know what's best for us, despite how much attention this issue has gotten for years. Not going to wait around much longer for Atlassian to do the needful, because they clearly know better.

#atlassian-knows-best

You're not missing anything, Atlassian has just decided that they know what we need better than we do.

#atlassian-knows-best

Brittany Joiner

There's a couple chrome extensions that will let you add more label options - one is Trelabels. I've seen a few others out there if you google "chrome extension trello labels", but Trelabels is the only one i have used before.

For the most part what I do is stick with the main colors Trello provides, but i click the labels show it always shows the name of the label and not just the color.

kimberlyn.crowe@gmail.com

Sure, but they only show up to the browser user; you can’t make the others in your team see it. Also, what about many of us with standardized style guides that we are not only expected to work with in all things, but also expect to see as a company in all things since we’ve been religiously trained to do so! Any other new color system in our product docs would be confusing and a time suck figuring out what’s what.

Steven Sefton

I originally used the labels with colours to represent a person. But we ran out of colours and then we wanted to use labels for specific tasks or the importance of tasks.

Now, we attach members to the card and leave labels for the stage of a project, like so...

Screenshot 2019-09-12 at 09.26.18.png Screenshot 2019-09-12 at 09.25.39.png

You can attache members here...

The colours can also mean a member too. My part in the project is Planning and Content so when I see these colours I know I have work to do.

Hope this helps.

Reed Meyer

I'm adding a "+1" here because it was implied in the comments that the additional colors are not on the near-term roadmap because the feature "is not very highly requested". So an additional comment saying "please add this" can't hurt.

Just out of curiosity: Does the Trello dev team dogfood its own product? If they do, I guess they just haven't had a need for more colors.

frsh-inc

so...as of today i'm seeing label text on my cards when i click the label color (i've no idea how long that feature has existed); and it seems like the color-blind patterns have changed, but...oh, wait, yeah, it's still too difficult to allow for additional colors. but see, now that you can have your label text, you don't need additional colors, you silly users!

Pu Koh

I personally use Labels to indicate a status of a job, and not who it's for. and I assume that's what the original devs built it for.

You can already assign people to cards. If you want to use colour to differentiate cards, you can get everyone to upload a solid colour image for their profile picture, then you can choose what ever colour you want.

Gregory Van Riper

I personally don't think anyone here requesting this is trying to use labels for who it is assigned to. I use status and type for the job. Which makes labels very limiting. ZenHub offers a full color picker. Trello should as well.

Just chiming in here on how incredibly frustrating it is to effectively use Trello with a paltry 10 colors - I manage tons of projects of varying complexity and I'm frustrated enough to chuck Trello in favor of another app that can do the work I need it to do. I'm really disappointed about it, but what initially seemed like a fantastic resource has basically turned into more of a blocker.