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

[Kearsten Lee]

We have a fairly small editorial team for our organization's blog and we've been able to use a simple color-code system that allows us to easily see what each person is currently working on, completed, or published based on their specific color + color of status (yellow, green or red).  However, as our team grows, we've run out of color options. Are there any power-ups or other ways to get more color options added to our board? 

[Lauren Moon · Accepted solution]

Hey everyone! Lauren from the Trello team here. Wanted to let you know that we have added 20 additional label colors for you to choose from: https://blog.trello.com/20-new-trello-label-colors

One of the reasons this feature took a while to implement is because it was important to us to maintain the accessibility of labels, meaning we wanted to maintain colorblind mode functionality for all label color options. This required additional design and development time.

That being said, these 20 new colors are just the beginning. We have made this feature in a way that gives us the ability to add more colors in the future, and we know that's of keen interest! 

Thanks all for your patience, let us know if you have any questions. 

[Ruthie Gray]

Hi Lauren,

Congratulations to the developers on adding 20 more colours to Trello labels, that's  a great step forward.

Unfortunately this addition has disabled the Trello Colors Extension I have been using for a long time which enables me to add as many colours as exist under the sun. This is a shame, as I still have a need for more than 20 very different colours - and sadly most of the shades that have been added by Trello's recent update are not very distinguishable from each other. :(

I'm wondering if the Trello developers could get in touch with @Brancy10 and work out how to implement his extension inside of Trello - it completely fits the bill, is easy to use and it works.

Or if @Brancy10 is able to update his extension so that we could keep using it until you are able to offer unlimited colour choices, that would be great!

Cheers,

Ruthie

[Brancy10]

Hey there! Thank you for mentioning me here—I'm currently working on an updated version of the extension just for this! It might be a day or two until I finish it, as I'm busy with some other things, but I'll notify you here once it's complete!

[Ruthie Gray]

That is fabulous news, thanks @Brancy10. You rock! 

[Web Design UK]

I'm adding my voice to the "we need a color picker in Trello" chorus.

These supposedly new colors are just washed out versions of the old, very limited ones.  So not an improvement at all in my opinion.

I can barely see my labels now.  Even if I try to use the darker tints, the labels are still pale.  Rendering labels pointless for our needs.

Also, I use Trello as an app, so cannot take advantage of the Google Chrome extension mentioned.

Additionally I am stunned that no one has made a power up to solve the lack of a color picker in Trello.  Please let me know if there is one hiding somewhere :-)

Vee

[Brancy10]

The extension has been updated! Check it out at https://github.com/SimplexShotz/Trello-Colors-Extension!

@Ruthie Gray

[Ruthie Gray]

Thanks a million @Brancy10. Love your work! 

[Alex]

I strongly dislike the implementation of new labels. Not only the label colors became less distinguishable, but also pale, with thin text, added unnecessary dot (which takes space and doesn't look good if you have multiple labels per card). Please give an option to remove the dot, disable paleness, make label text bold, or just an option to use previous implementation of labels.

[Web Design UK]

Well put, hopefully someone at Trello will listen and implement this at least.

What we actually need is a colour picker for labels.

[Andrew]

Hi. @Brancy10 
I'm getting an error: (on the pic)

On my other computer, however, it disappeared after a while.
What do you think it could be related to? And how can I try to fix it?
thx

[Brancy10]

@Andrew

Looks like the extension was unable to grab the Aria Label that cards usually have; This is probably because of the language that you're using for Trello.

That looks like Russian, but I'm not totally sure—could you confirm this for me?

[Andrew]

@Brancy10 
Yes, that's right I use Russian version.
The previous version worked fine in all languages, but this one only works for English.

[Brancy10]

@Andrew

I just committed a change to the repository that should fix the issue. Update to the newest version the same way you updated the extension previously, and you should be all set!

Thank you for bringing this to my attention!

[Andrew]

Thank you! 

[Alex]

This case is why I am generally wary of software as services: you never know when they are gonna ruin the feature/product you liked before. With standalone software you can at least keep using a previous version that suited you better.

[bd]

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

[Jeremy A.]

agreed.

[lxm9]

agreed, too.

[John Hawkins]

Agreed

[Deleted user]

I don't agree with your point here. I think these guys didn't randomly pick some colors for labels (support for color-blind people) and probably it is a useful thing in large groups to refer labels by colors you can name (like light-blue or green). But I do agree that we need more predefined colors.  

[bd]

You may not agree, Fent, but your observations make no sense.  First of all, here is a list of color names that far exceeds what is available (if you google searched, you could have found it for yourself):

https://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_names.asp

Secondly, a larger company is likely more in need of more colors than a small company.

Thirdly. needing colors to be pre-defined like you're in pre-school is nonsense - there's no reason besides laziness, incompetence or manipulation to not have a color picker and make it so a user can define (or at least choose) colors or define their own palettes, like every other software since about 1998.

Sorry, my point still stands and I disagree with the sense of your disagreement.

[Matt Beamish]

I can see Fent's point here: in some respect, colours need to be easily referrable ("hey, there's a blue tag on such-and-such a card, can you look into it?") and as much as there's a lot of named colours, there's not often enough visual difference to be able to refer to them easily ("no, add a Chartreuse tag to that one, not Lime!  Lime's only for jobs that don't fit into YellowGreen or GreenYellow!")

The problem with this argument simply falls down with the fact that once you're past ten labels, you're already reusing existing colours anyway.  So rather than Chartreuse-vs-Lime, it's simply green-vs-green, and that's worse.

Even with that said, there's certainly more than 10 distinct named colours out there, and moreso than that: why not let the customer make the decision as to how to muddy the coloured-label waters?

[bd]

"why not let the customer make the decision as to how to muddy the coloured-label waters?"

That's it right there. 

There's an answer to that question.  Here are some possibilities: 1) Not enough devs 2) Laziness 3) Incompetence 4) Carelessness 5) Psychological manipulation of users 6) Extorting money for a feature that is typically included.

1) is the only option that doesn't make Atlassian look like at best fools and at worst a-------.

[Matt Beamish]

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

...or a business decision that makes sense in someone's head, but isn't flowing down the line.  It could be a lack of devs; more likely their priorities are simply elsewhere.  I tend to err on the side of "they have what they believe is a good reason," because... I dunno, I like to see the good in people.  It'd still be nice to see this feature added down the line.  You know, when they've got time.  Right guys?

[bd]

No.

I haven't attributed anything to them, but to remove unethical intent from the table is to live in some fairy-land in your imagination.  

I'd rather not assume anything, period.

[Deleted user]

Absolutely right you are, Matt! 

I'm looking forward to see Trello's Nachos design system extended with more colors. 

There could be a color picker too in Trello and it would perfectly fit right next to custom stickers and backgrounds. If they decide to make it a premium function. 

But anyway these questions must be answered wisely and developed carefully in such a worldwide product. 

Ps. Ben, if you check out Google's Material design system (which was released in 2015 or '16 and updated regularly since then) you might note the Predefined color palette. I bet it's not the laziness or manipulation or preschool or whatever behind having a palette, but a result of hard work to see what colors match together and look good on a website.

Trello isn't about CSS-customizing a webpage (although can be done with custom power-ups!) but rather creating an easy to use and ready to go workspace.

In my opinion.

[bd]

I looked briefly at the material design for predefined color palette and didn't find any, if you know where it is I'd like to look at it.  I did, however, notice on their main material design page a color picker ready to go.

You think a color picker is a "premium function"?  Are you effing serious?

What a joke, I'm not surprised you and Matt agree.

[bd]

I briefly checked their Material Design system and did not find the predefined palette you described, if you know where it is I'd like to see it.

BTW giving users a color picker to define their own colors isn't about anyone "CSS-customizing" anything from their perspective, it's about picking a color and defining it.

[Deleted user]

Some reference to material design colors:

https://material.io/tools/color/ - The color tool, on the right you can see material palette

https://material.io/design/color/the-color-system.html#tools-for-picking-colors - You must scroll to the bottom of the page, it was updated since I last visited the site, but there is a good description why: 

2014 Material Design color palettes

These color palettes, originally created by Material Design in 2014, comprises of colors designed to work together harmoniously, and can be used to develop your brand palette.

And there are many frameworks that still use Material Palette: 

https://getmdl.io/styles/index.html - Bottom of the page.

https://materializecss.com/color.html - Each color has a named class so you can easily add them to your site. 

Card labels in trello currently have the same solution as seen above. Each label has a color identifier class (ex. "card-label-yellow") which adds the background color on CSS.

Anyway. I checked out if it is possible to solve the problem with some custom Power Up, but not really. Cards don't have any unique identifier in DOM and the labels area can't be accessed with capabilities. The only option that seems possible to me is adding badges to the cards which is the worst solution of this problem. 

I didn't come here to argue, but this seems a great way to keep this thread active :)

[bd]

Fent, all I see when I follow your links is evidence on how much support these people have to generate an environment with more than a handful of colors.  I see nothing here that excuses them from this abomination.

I would have responded the first time I looked at it, but it was disheartening.

[Matt Beamish]

Poking around the Nachos design standard (https://design.trello.com/style/color) while Labels are defined as "one of ten colors", the Trello colour palette actually supports 10 shades of each colour.  So why can't we have labels that pull from that 100-colour list?  For example, a long-press on the label colour picker would then allow you to choose which shade you want?

[Susan Hamby Kridler]

Ben David, thanks for the link to that color chart! https://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_names.asp
Just an aside: It's odd that what they call "chocolate" is so orange. I'd call that something like rust or light sienna, and even as a chocolate addict, I'd hesitate to eat chocolate that color unless it was supposed to contain orange zest or something.

[tyler dockery]

Shameful. If your organization has 10 products and each needs a color... Screwed. 

I could easily see organizations wanting to use their signature branded colors, etc. Open this product up to developers. If your dev team is too small, ask the community to fix it. There are many people adding chrome extensions to fix this, why not just let the users fix the product?

[jstamm-s101]

Atlassian obviously doesn't understand the priority this limitation should be taking, and our complaints are doing nothing to refocus their efforts, so I'd recommend you tweet Trello from time to time until this issue starts to be handled professionally.

#atlassian-knows-best

[Michael Rom]

Agreed!

[Kamalaya Yang]

Here in 2021 with an update: still nothing :) 

[Jen Marshall]

Yep - come on! Surely this isn't a 4 year long job!

[Tammi Labrecque]

Almost 2022!

[Juan Manuel Alonso]

It's 2022

[Chris Nutbeen]

FFS

[Bianca Frank Design]

Just a designer...here begging for more color options in June of 2022.

[Deleted user]

I have the same issue though not for the same reason. I use colors to keep things organized across multiple apps. Some of those colors exist in Trello but some do not. Adding colors of my choice would be really helpful. 

[Branden Stall]

Same here... I have a large team and we use contractors for a lot of stuff. We have run into the same issue with not having enough label colors. I love the organization of trello and having a custom color picker for labels would greatly increase our ability to use it.

[Jochen Rieger]

+1

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.

[Matteo Tramet]

absolutely agree...

[jstamm-s101]

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

[Richard Osborne]

Who's here in 2020 and still seeing notifications coming in for this feature request from 2017?

Maybe we should start holding annual get togethers?

[Gregory Van Riper]

We can have a cookout and everyone bring their own recommended color palettes.

[jstamm-s101]

[kimberlyn.crowe@gmail.com]

[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!)

[Jochen Rieger]

Same here!

[jstamm-s101]

My workaround for this issue is to always create boards by copying another board with the correct labels. However, if you need to change them, it is a real chore. Lots of wasted time. +1 for global or team-level labels.

[Ivo van Zon]

Global and team level mixed (or multi layered teams), that should work… Like toolkit level (wait for vendor, bug reported to vendor), Company general (wait for customer, Database change needed), customer specific version numbers and so on. 

Regarding label colors: well it's up to the organisations to decide, but there will always be people who have problems with certain combinations… so providing a safe set with a good contrast ratio is a good start

[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.

[Richard Osborne]

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

[sebastien.dos-santos]

april 2020 and still waiting

[Eirik Trond Vangsnes]

June 2020 checking in, still waiting!

[Nancy Welch]

Oct 2020 and apparently still waiting.....

[Ruthie Gray]

I have just created an Atlassian Community account specifically to add my request to so many others - PLEASE, please, please can you add more label colours to Trello?

I use different coloured labels to flag tasks for different clients - and I would like to be able to identify more than 10 clients. I currently use the add-on so that the name of the label is displayed also, but it is just not the same.

While I appreciate the kindness that current set-up is to cater for the colour-blind, surely it is possible to work around this to also cater for the non-colour-blind of us.

Do we need to start some kind of petition? Can we request this through other avenues? Who do we have to talk to to get this advanced up the developer line? can someone volunteer to fix it?

I have to say although I love everything else about Trello, I am considering moving to different software purely because of this issue.

[kimberlyn.crowe@gmail.com]

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. 

[Laura Zielke]

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

[Ruthie Gray]

@Brancy10 You are a genius!

I just downloaded and installed your extension from GitHub. It works! I have colours, all the wonderful colours. An endless rainbow of Trello label colours! SOOOO HAPPY RN!!! Thank you from the bottom of my colourful heart. You've made my year.

[Michele Nelson]

This is great! Now if only we could do the same thing with Cover colours :) 

[Tobias Naumann]

I was wondering about the color-limitation since I am using Trello. Now that I am annoyed (and needy) enough, I decided to create an account to simply +1 here to show that there are more people in need for this feature.

I assume there are more people like me who want this but are just not annoyed enough to participate here.

[jstamm-s101]

@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]

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.

[jstamm-s101]

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

[Isabel Pereira]

I find myself having to restructure our team's work flow around the available colours which seems backwards to me...this is highly frustrating! 

Maybe Atlassian should put the colour question to all Trello users for a vote to see if this is really not an issue as they claim...how about a pop-up with a yes/no/don't care question and a running percentage to be transparent.

Would adding more colour options to the labels help improve your team's workflow or how you set up tasks? 

[Matt Beamish]

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?

[jstamm-s101]

One would think. But what do we, the customers, know?

[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.

[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

[See Yin Tan]

+1 colours for labels! 

[Mike]

Hi Kearsten,

We're not aware of any way of adding new colors to the set of labels, unfortunately! I'll pass this on to the team, though, so they can better understand how this is affecting you.

You do have the ability to add an unlimited amount of labels, including the ability to repeat colors. To make that a little clearer, there a number of Chrome extensions that will allow for the label name to be shown on the front of the card, which can help you distinguish between multiple labels of the same color: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/trelabels-for-trello/annjdmkbhchmobehkcfilecnlhibedbj?hl=en

[Courtney Olean Paige]

I love this idea. We run into an issue where we have a need for a multitude of colors. Would be great to have the ability to create custom colors. 

[JayH]

Github is a good example of the use and need for colored labels.

[Courtney Olean Paige]

There you go! Thx Jay!

[JayH]

No problem Courtney! I actually am looking at scaling our process which leverages JIRA and because I am also working on a Github project, I want to use some of Github's practices  in JIRA including the use of color lables. That is what landed me here. 

[Tony Sansico]

Same here, we need more colors ! =)

[ilya-nrds]

Visualize this in same fashion as Epics - you can have color coded epics.

[Emily Eichelberger]

I love this idea. I recently started using a project board to organize planning, and it would be great to have the labels be colored so we can see which items belong together. 

[April Pettit]

Sooooo, it's been a while . . . any word on those colors yet? Is there a chrome extension that allows you to add more colors? In summation: I NEED ALL THE COLORS/UNLIMITED COLOR OPTIONS!!!!

[Brancy10]

@April Pettit I know it’s been almost a full year now, but check my answer if you’re looking for a Chrome extension :)

[KOHESION]

S T I L L    W A I T I N G    F O R    A   C O L O U R    P I C K E R    F O R    L A B E L S ! ! !  ! ! ! ! 

[Elizabeth Cvetic]

2021 and still WAITING.  I can't believe this is still an issue.  On nearly every board I manage I wish I had more label colors. I'm forced to combine labels into groupings I would rather not combine, but since there are so few colors I have no choice.  Atlassian Team:  I'm surprised at how tone deaf you are on this matter.  Color is important to a LOT of people.  I'm especially dismayed since I own TEAM stock, and this is enough of an issue for me to make me question how tuned in this company really is to the needs of its customer base.  Seriously - bolt in the color wheel and get this done!! 

And don't even get me started on how lame the card search functionality is...

[Andrew Stanley]

I have been a Trello user for many years; I love Trello! However, this has been and remains one of my biggest gripes about the tool. This is seems like such an easy and logical move, and it has literally frustrated me for years.

[Jonathan May]

Going to chuck my hat into the ring to say that, yes, this is a desperately needed feature.

I understand about color blindness, but that isn't really for you to decide. Set it as a default, then let users decide what works for them or their team. The majority of users will be completely unimpaired by colorblindness so to prevent a feature as a result seems completely asinine. Listen to your user base, developers that assume they know more about how their product is used than the actual users are the cause of getting left behind by competitors

[Tzippy Rapp]

I created an account so I could add another request to increase the number of colors offered for the Trello labels.
Trello is meant to be easy, and quick to organize. Im not looking for some complicated coding roundabout hack, I just want to be able to easily choose more colors for the board labels.

This is a huge annoyance and down side to using trello. Please add more colors.

[Jeff Tomband]

This is a good question and I feel it is another case of where the branding/profile of the brand overrides user need.

I understand that the app has a certain palette, Go ahead, have those as defaults. But as most have stated, colour is a powerful tool so it should be added to the users arsenal.
Having to have addons to the product for such a basic function is a bit ridiculous.