The thought that I had was what if I could have one tab in the color selector (among the [All] | [R] | [G] | [B]) where I could save colors I use consistently as my own little custom palette to reuse colors consistently across spaces. This custom palette would also give Ethan or anyone else a place to store the grey’s they want to use.
I’m with you and get it. Not a huge priority at all.
My motivation is to be able to consistently use the same colors across multiple spaces, and not just a similar shade, but “this shade of blue means x, this shade of blue means y”. This way colors can represent something and be like muscle memory at a quick glance.
Yeah I don’t think colors actually have to go that deep, but I also don’t want to tag every card as “Heading”, “Child”, “TBD”, and that’s where colors can serve a lot of various purposes easily across spaces if I had an easy way to reuse them at a specific color vs various shades that come up with the existing picker.
not sure if this addresses this , but with the Style options you can select multiple cards and apply the same tag to all of them at once. It’s potentially the same number of clicks as setting card colors
It’s not really about number of clicks. Visually, color serves a different purpose than tags, imo. With tags, I’m adding data to the card vs colors I can quickly glance and get a read on something without adding or reading, if that makes sense……
Yeah, tags are interesting because they change the card name. And that changes how it’s used and what it means.
I’ve made this point before, but it keeps coming up because I think there’s a desire for it. That is, the ability to attach metadata to cards that indicate that these cards belong to a specific group, which I can name.
Tags don’t serve this because they change the card contents, so are not solely meta data. Also, visually, they can overbearing because of how they are rendered (text with colored background on every card).
Card colors don’t serve this because you can’t apply semantics to a color, formally. A blue card over here might be blue for a different reason than a blue card over there, even if they use the same blue. But, visually, they are a great way to indicate a grouping. I think that’s why people are asking for that next level of being able to apply meaning to a color. (Having custom saved colors doesn’t do it for me).
Connections are really close. You can give connections a name, so that satisfies the semantic piece. However, connections have a start and end, which is extra information that is irrelevant when you simply want to say that these cards belong to the same group. And finally, visually, they are also a bit noisy, and due to the prior point, they don’t visually indicate a group. They indicate connections, as they should.
I’m not saying anything new here, but simply rehashing things within the context of this request. Hopefully it doesn’t muddy up this thread, but I think it’s very related. The reason why people want to save colors for future use is because they want to apply semantics to certain colors. But if you were to implement just an easy way to recall used/saved colors, that doesn’t go the full way.
My motivation is to be able to consistently use the same colors across multiple spaces,
i can do this relatively easily, the catch is it’d just be the ability to save named custom colors. the colors won’t be ‘live’ so you won’t be able to change a color and have all the dependent things update their color.
My hesitation is that this feature would cause confusion down the line if you were to implement more robust “grouping”, whatever that ends up doing. This feature implies that you could use it for such grouping, but as you say, it won’t be live—in other words, the data is not actually represented as a group. It’s surface-level being able to name a color. I don’t want us to be trapped, or at least impeded, in a local maxima.
Also, for whatever future grouping is, I don’t think color should be the main way to represent a group. I imagine groups to be more like a region. That is, formalizing the clumps that people already arrange in a space. Within those clumps, I think people would appreciate the freedom to use various colors, frames, tags, connections, etc. All this is to say, if people start to use this lightweight color naming thing for grouping (which the quoted desire indicates), it might interfere once real groups/regions/clumps are introduced.
I know this is all a bit abstract. Just my two cents
Personally, I’m not looking for grouping, naming, or anything like that here. Just a simple way to re-use colors across spaces, they don’t need to mean anything…
…in order to be consistently used across spaces, but it’s not something that needs to be super rigid… because I might color code tasks across my journals too:
So I could use similar colors but not use for the exact same purpose, but the ~vibe and essence~ stays consistent.
To be able to save those colors and easily reuse the next day would be super helpful.
And then if it’s a palette to select from, it could be used to select tag and connection colors too to help keep a consistent look and feel when creating things that are related:
None of this needs naming or grouping properties for me, I just want to be able to select the colors easily without copying the color code or copying cards across spaces.
Pixelmator and Procreate are examples of a simple way (in use, not implementation) to just add colors to a palette. If the “All | R | G | B” had one more button and it started out all grey until you started selecting colors and hitting the plus (like the first example below), it would more than meet my needs / desire.
Thanks @kordumb. I think I may have overthinking this. I’ve found a desire for saving commonly used colors too. No names or meanings. So what you said sounds good
