The end of an era: bidding farewell to Trello's original theme

[#1]

Earlier this month, we announced the launch of the highly requested Dark mode in Trello as well as some improvements to the light theme including shifting the color palette and other experience updates. The feedback has been pouring in, and we’re so thrilled to hear that you’re loving the new themes!

These new themes help us modernize our UI to better support future developments on Trello. As a result, we wanted to share that we will be retiring the original Trello theme and will officially be making the switch to the new themes on Thursday, June 15.

If you’ve already made the switch to one of the new themes, you’ll notice no difference with this change. However, if you are still on the original theme, we strongly encourage you to give the new themes a try — we think (and hope) you’ll love it!

After Thursday, you’ll still have the option to choose between Light, Dark, and Automatic modes, but you’ll no longer be able to revert to the original theme through the theme toggle.

Thank you for your feedback

First and foremost, thank you to all who provided feedback on the new themes. We do take time to read every single one, and your opinions and suggestions are invaluable to help us make Trello better.

We’ve heard and have taken note of some of your concerns and suggestions, and we wanted to let you know that we’re on it! We're working hard on updates to colors like yellow, orange, red, and dark gray, so stay tuned for more updates over the coming weeks.

We also wanted to take the time here to address and acknowledge those of you who have expressed a preference for the original theme. We hear you and we really appreciate your honest feedback. We know that changes like these are sometimes difficult and we just hope that over time, you’ll come to enjoy the new themes just as much as you did the original.

While we will be moving forward with the new themes, please continue to give us feedback and suggestions on how we can improve your experience on Trello.

with ,

the Trello team

[Brittany Joiner]

Woohooo! Excited for the dark mode life!! Thanks for all the work you've all put into this!

[Olivia Williams]

Thanks for the information. Will there ever be an option for users to customize the colors of card covers and custom labels with a hex code? 

Also, could the custom field colors be expanded / updated to match the card covers? With the new theme, the red card cover and a red custom field look like very different shades on my screen, which makes it tougher for me to tell what's a top priority:

 

Also, the dark gold behind black text for upcoming deadlines is tough for me to read.

This may have been what was meant by the team working on updates to colors like yellow, orange, and red, but I just wanted to make sure.

Thank you!

[MF_BOT]

So disappointed. I want the original theme back!

[Lori]

So, you acknowledge that many of us HATE the new colors, as has been stated in other posts on this forum, say you're "working on it", yet go ahead and introduce the second version of new colors that are even worse than the ones you changed to previously? If you were really proud of the new color theme you wouldn't bury this news in a forum post. You'd push the notification to users with the Trello dog pop-up on the top of the screen that you've used for past news about new features.

I also HATE the rounded corners of the cards, and the taller menu bars at the top of the screen that, combined, take up at least a quarter of my vertical board. But, I've given this feedback before and been ignored, so I have no hope of change. I just want the satisfaction of hearing other users say how much they hate it too.

"Changes like this are sometimes difficult" is a cliche. Good changes are not difficult. We experience them in life all the time. Poor changes are indeed difficult.

I have never so seriously contemplated moving my entire system elsewhere. I've done it before and I can do it again.

[Trello]

Good morning from Australia.  Was really dissappointed all our extended pastel board label colours have disappeared.  The new colours are much stronger, thus have less contrast with black text and are harder on the eyes.  (and more importantly, just aren't as pretty).  Would really love to be able to restore what we had.  Sincerely.

[CH]

I'm personally not a fan of the new colours, although I'm sure I'll get used to it. A warning notification or similar would have been appreciated, not a forum post that we have to search for.

Having said that, I think we could have done without the patronising "we know change is difficult" - we are all adults here, just explain to us what is happening and why, and give us some warning. I logged in thismorning and everything looks totally different, no warning that today was the day for the change.

[Donna]

WOW!!!
After readjusting our lives after the forced colour changes and updating goodness knows how many automations we have across our entire entity - here we are again being forced to just accept more dismal appearances...

This latest change in colour is appauling, nothing POPS anymore, so I am not sure why I should pay hundreds of $$ for annual subscriptions without any compensation to the continued disruption these changes are being forced upon us, we now need to adjust and update our systems/automations yet again.

Another blow, discovering the absense of Low>Medium>High colour palettes when using the Custom Fields after the vibrant colours have now been removed - not sure why you even bother to give us the option to have a colour palette anymore as it is totally useless now! 

[CPS Reception]

I don't like the new colours particularly but I'll live.

The frustrating thing is that green and bright teal positions have been switched in the new colours. I have already advised of this which you've said you've read every comment. Does this not warrant an update? 
Does no one else have this issue?
All of my previously teal boards are now green [lime]. I do not want to have to go and manually change them all to teal (which used to be green...) again. The colour I want them to be is a aquamarine green with some blue in it which has switched postion and you call simply [green]

There was no communication about the removal of the 'old' colours and its sad that I have to google it to find this page with an explanation.

I understand you can never make everyone happy but I do think that swapping colours with each other is a valid complaint. I'm not complaining about shades here.

I imagine I will have to spend the time to manually update these myself. Grumble.

[Alexis]

Very sad. You've replaced the bright, distinct colors with a menu of drab, dismal, and ugly colors, and as a bonus wasted a bunch of unnecessary vertical space. I'm now seeing 1-2 less cards vertically, and due to my zoom level (bad eyesight- yay accessibility!) I now get as few as 4 actual cards vertically on some of my lists.

You could offer ways to customize colors, styles, and things like apply colors to cards directly, but instead you're making me seriously consider spending time I don't have to waste on finding a new product to use. Echoing the comment: "I have never so seriously contemplated moving my entire system elsewhere. I've done it before and I can do it again."

[Peter C]

This is nuts. The new colors are horrible

And forcing people to use these colors by taking away the option for the original theme is ridiculous.

As someone who is color-blind this makes the system much much harder to use.

Adding and refining new features is good. Taking away features and making your system less useful is not.

[Vongsawat]

Welp. This has overall been a massive disappointment. No idea why Trello keeps doubling down on making their systems harder to use, and removing features in the name of 'improvement'.

Yay for dark-mode, I guess. Massive loss for general usability as a result.

At this point, just open it up to customization for god's sake. Or just maintain two different themes, one for light and one for dark, if that's what it takes. Not this kind of ugly compromise that works for no-one.

The feedback has been incessant and pretty aligned. People just use Trello in a way that is very different from the designers on the Trello team, apparently. The new theme works best if you use labels to denote departments or whatever. Horrible for anything else. And it looks like there's been no thought given towards what the colours are conveying, no colour language. Hell, light-yellow and light-orange can't even be discerned from each other. I keep discovering more and more weird design choices hidden in the colours.

Customization. In to Themes that can be shared between Boards. And you'll stop having issues with reducing your customer base to only the people who use Trello in the exact same way that your Design team apparently uses it.

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And that's not even going in to the readability and just how much less compact the new theme is. Skimming through the board, I can't even focus my eyes on a single card, because all I see is the whitespace. Knowing how I reacted to Gmail and Reddit doing this, its right at the cusp of viability for me. So even once I acclimatize, it'll take pointed effort to skim at all.

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On that point, I'm actually starting to look in to if there are 3rd party apps that reformat Trello into something usable and hopefully customizable. Or if we all have to jump in to dodgy extensions to override these kinds of changes. Set up a general repository to keep things constant through the team, etc. Its not effecting me hard enough to switch entirely (though I'm sure there's a small demographic where this might just tip them over the edge). You'd think that Trello, being a productivity tool, would have a better grasp on things like this though...

[OTAVIO ALVES]

Bom dia, Comecei a utilizar o Trello dia 15 mesmo peguei o tema original infelizmente no ultimo dia dele.

Uma pena, além de gostar do formato, as cores eram mais vivas. 

Fica como Feedback, por mais moderno que seja o novo tema, poderiam manter o antigo, tinha mais personalidade.

Um ótimo dia a todos.

[James]

Easy differentiation between colours should be the main test of the theme, not sure why that wasn't a central requirement here. Looking forward to the fix addressing this once it's developed.

This quote from Lori is brilliant! :

"Changes like this are sometimes difficult" is a cliche. Good changes are not difficult. We experience them in life all the time. Poor changes are indeed difficult.

[Amy Scales]

With the old theme you could easily differentiate between the card colours. Now it's not so easy. Plus green and teal swapped over. The dark yellow and orange colours are particularly hard to differentiate between. 

The colours of the dates are also horrible - it's supposed to be a traffic light system - Red, Yellow, Green - not the dark colours we have now. And the black/white writing of the date within those colours is inconsistent and jarring.

I also see fewer cards on my boards on the new theme - with nothing additional of any use taking up that space. Don't you know how users feel about scrolling.

[Lori]

EXACTLY 

[Alex]

Time to say goodbye and change to other program. We really hate this new design. 
It was good while it lasted. Good luck and see you never :)

[Brandon Harris]

(Your editor seems to think that I have posted a bunch of html in this, and is now refusing to let me post until I edit some text, yah for your kwality software.)

I am begging you to hire people who understand color and how it is used. Please pay someone who has actually studied this instead of randomly picking tones from a palette.

Once again, my label colors were forced changed in an update. The argument of "there are more colors now" doesn't wash for me because they removed the old ones. Why is this a problem?

We set priorities along a yellow - orange - red line. There is now no way to create that without either a) the yellow being so muted that it can't stand out; b) the orange and red being the exact same tone; or c) the yellow and orange being the exact same tone.

I don't know who does color design there but you need to build for people who have color deficiencies as well as macular degeneration. Contrast is important and the fact that you don't seem to get this makes me question what other bad decisions have been made.

[Brandon Harris]

Maybe your designers only think that color contrast values matter in isolation (e.g., the text on the red label) but they DO NOT the point of the colors is to be able to differentiate them against each other.

Let's actually look at the color contrast ratios along the lines of rows 1 2 and 3!

row 1, yellow to orange: FAIL with a 1.01. orange to red: FAIL: 1.14.
row 2, yellow to orange: FAIL with a 1.01. orange to red: FAIL: 1.42.
row 3, yellow to orange: FAIL with a 1.01. orange to red: FAIL: 1.06.

You have to _work_ to fail with a 1.01 - that means that the contrast is so low as to almost be negligible.  And you did it on ALL THREE ROWS.

[Alexis]

Brandon has nailed it on the head- Even if you ignore accessibility issues, you've screwed up any ability to have a consistent color language in my labels and card colors. "We set priorities along a yellow - orange - red line"- This is also what I did, also using Green, and now the "stoplight" colors are all messed up and/or literally missing. (There's essentially no stoplight yellow or stoplight green now)

It baffles me that it seems no one in charge of theming actually thought about the colors in this way.

(It still baffles me that I can't just assign colors to lists! or pick my own hex colors for labels/cards! Why!? Why MUST I pick from a pre-defined set of 10-30 colors, and how did you manage to leave out basic primary colors from a set of THIRTY?)

[Andrew Ling]

I had created a support ticket for what I thought was a missing radio button allowing use of the original theme, not realising it had been axed. The support team responded with an explanation and linked to this post, which I had not seen. My response:

Thanks for your response. I read the community forum post you provided a link to. It seems many users are not happy about it, understandably.

I may have missed it but I cannot find any notification regarding this change. I appreciate that a user interface will undergo a refresh from time to time but this change seems poorly thought through. Trello has been one of my favourite apps and as a user with many years history on the old theme, the impact for me of this change over was firing up Trello on a normal busy workday, ready to do some daily task planning and management, to find that everything looked different. Colour coded priorities were no longer recognizable and not as many task cards were visible on the screen. I had to then spend considerable time figuring out how to convert the auto-converted colours in the new theme to a different colour in the new theme that was close enough to the old colour to make it easy to recognise at a glance. This was not something I was anticipating having forced on me and it was not helpful. It added unproductive time to my workday when the reason I use Trello in the first place is to help manage my workday, projects and tasks productively. It does not appear possible to fit the same number of cards and text on the screen now, as the rounded corners consume a significant amount of screen space, with no way to turn them off.

I appreciate that some aspects of the new themes may help better support future developments but what you have achieved with this change in addition to new colours and card/list shapes, is the following:

• Trashed the colour-coded categorisation of cards for every existing user/organisation that has embedded these into their operations. I imagine this would be most users.
• Reduced the amount of meaningful information that can be displayed on a window or screen
• Potentially rendered some automation routines inoperable or meaningless.

 This change has not simply added different colours and a different card and list shape, it has reduced the utility of the app. I am not against change, when it is positive. I don’t mind the new theme colours. They are fine, apart from the yellow, which is not yellow. But they are not what have been associated with the card categories I have developed and the business processes built around the previous colours. The rounded corners I can live with, if forced to. Besides looking a bit yesterday and twee, I don’t see a benefit to them – they simply force more scrolling and scanning to get the information needed.

 This change could have been much more palatable if the following allowances were made:

• Let users know that the original theme will be phased out on a certain date and provide some reasoning – identify benefits moving forward, apart from simply looking more modern. That would likely solicit more meaningful feedback.
• Keep an option for using the original theme
  • Trello is a relatively simple interface. This is one of the great things about it. Due to its simplicity, users will configure the interface with available customisations to code, categorise and represent their complex tasks and operations. A key part of this is colour coding with labels. Colours are imbued with meaning. Different meanings for different operations, teams etc. Many users will likely have spent quite some time associating particular colours within the limited Trello palette to mean different things. In summarily throwing out the old colour palette Trello has trashed all such work users have put into it. A new colour theme is not just a new set of colours, it is also a new categorisation system.
• Allow for a transition period and provide a way to migrate from the original theme to the new theme
  • If users have time to consider and choose new colours, the transition could be managed and business processes could be tweaked without being summarily broken.
  • Provide tools to convert from one colour to another.
• Ensure that colours are handled consistently across the app. Current issues:
  • Card covers do not accept the same set of colours as labels
  • Colours shown on automation are different to those shown on labels, even the descriptions are different.
• Consider some changes to ensure that screen real estate is valued as much as with the original theme:
  • Show label colours within the card margin consumed by the rounded corners. This would help compensate for the loss of information within available space. The horizontal top border, vertical side border could be considered.

Thank you,

Andy

[Leon Długosz]

Many people have already said it but I'm still going to put out my opinion.The new Colours are awful I spent a lot of time matching colours for my boards and now it's all shaded and looks literally like piss.

Currently searching for a new management app, would love some recommendations.

Thank you,

Leon

[Jason King]

I do not care for the look of the cards with rounded corners - it takes up more valuable screen space. I urge the designers to implement an option to return to the original theme. Thank you.

[TN]

I highly encourage you to bring back the old design that companies and workflows were accustomized to. Otherwise you´ll lose a lot of customers, me included. Just read the posts above...

[Baptiste Costa]

Trello is slowly but surely digging its own grave.

[Hamza Bedjaoui]

NUL NUL NUL TRELLO