Allow ONLY the default background color to be changed

A very simple request: allow a user to change ONLY the color of the default background.

WHY: The current default background color does not allow the cards on a board to easily stand out from the background and makes the screen too bright and harsh for me and, from what I have read, for many users. I really love the images that Asana provides for backgrounds, but I love them as art and find them too distracting when used as a background. Also, as an individual with ADD, I really don’t need anything that will distract me when using Asana to organize my work and my life. The color could be selected in the user’s profile settings for the display.

No scope creep . . . can Asana just give us 24 bits to set the RGB color of the default background?

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Great idea @Mark_Regina Let’s add gradients into that as well :slight_smile:

@Mark_Regina Great idea!
I added my vote for this one. Would love to just change the color.

Gradients would add to the scope. Background color is a basic property of forms and windows and somewhere in the Asana code it gets specified from either a constant or a variable that has been defined. Picking up a value from the Profile Settings - Display and using it to set a variable that gets applied to the default background color should be a relatively minor code change. This minor code change would greatly increase the usability for me and probably quite a few others. Unfortunately, the existing background color is most likely seen as a minor inconvenience to only some users; however, look at how long users have been asking for changes to the background. By purposefully limiting the scope of my request to only the default background color, it should make the actual coding task much simpler and hopefully more likely for Asana to undertake the long overdue task. Admittedly the change would not add sex appeal to the product, but wouldn’t more potential users be willing to adopt Asana over a competing product if they could see the cards more clearly?

The fact you want any change at all is addition to scope.

Gradients is a very simple CSS property whereby you simple pick 2 colors. So if you have to pick a single color, picking two is very little additional work.

Thanks for the link. I’m too used to writing firmware for microcontrollers and didn’t shift my thinking to web apps.

Poked around in Chrome’s developer tools and found where the background color is set in the CCS:

body {
    background-color: var(--color-background-medium);
    box-sizing: border-box;
    color: var(--color-text);
    fill: var(--color-icon);
    font-family: -apple-system,BlinkMacSystemFont,"Segoe UI",Roboto,"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif;
    font-size: 14px;
    overflow: hidden;
}

Just for fun, I tweaked the first value below so now it displays the background as a brilliant yellow:

--color-background-medium: #F6F909;
    --color-background-medium-rgb: 246, 248, 249;

Refreshed the Asana page and set display to use sky image and then tweaked so that it did a linear gradient instead:

.ThemeSetter--sky {
    background-image: linear-gradient(to bottom right, red , blue);
    background-repeat: no-repeat;
    background-size: cover;
}

Maybe I need to look at some of the browser extensions that I’ve seen referenced in other posts, but will that take care of the app in addition to the browser?

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It looks like we can’t even change the background to any image? Are the only options really light or dark?? I have low vision and it’s very hard for me to see the cards in the board view. On an old account, I used to be able to change the background to something contrasting from the cards, but I can’t find that setting anymore. It’s hard to look at, and the whole appeal of Asana was making project management pretty. Could you hire some accessibility people to work on display options?