I usually get excited in front of new things, and I have to say it is undestandable that a “fall/CYMK” colours theme could be enjoyable to some of us. I wouldn’t dislike the new palette if it was on a food blog, but this palette declined in a project/task management app, where readability and prioritization are almost everything is really awful. At first I thought my monitor was defective, there were no warnings to the users.
Take the priority tags colors as an example: a vibrant red is really a heads-up task with high priority, now we have to READ and look for the “high” word (written in a slightly darker red font too, making this even harder) instead of having the visual eye-catching difference between the “high” and “medium” tag colors.
There is no contrast between colors and backgrounds, so everything really blends in too much, making Asana UX difficult.
Colors in this context must be easy to describe: green, violet, orange…now we have to switch to “sage green” or “mauve” or “caramel”. WTF Asana, I have work to do, I don’t want to become a graphic designer to accomplish my tasks. At least give the user an option to select the palette, give every color a version: vibrant, darker, pastel, whatever the heck…but let the user decide.
Really hate the new colours - A lot of users would be delighted to see the old colours return (ASAP).
I think you should take into consideration how many people don’t like this update… Please give people the opportunity to choose the colors themselves. Now looking at Asana I feel like there’s something wrong with my screen - like it’s dirty 
Can we expect the color to be back by today? This is the worst decision Asana has made since started with you guys.
My next option is Monday or clickup.
Suppose switching cost isn’t that high to change a PM software.
The previous colors were better for me
Wow, do people come across as entitled – and sometimes, downright rude – in this thread! Kudos and strength to the Asana team/community managers going through all these comments.
I came here to say that I, too, preferred the previous palette, but like any change we’ll likely get used to it. (Remember folks, we’re the ones telling our clients/users that all it takes to get used to Asana is a few weeks of use. Same applies here and in life generally: we adapt to pretty much anything in the end.)
From a usability perspective it’d be good to offer a choice of two palettes though, Asana’s new palette or a brighter/more contrasted one. But not sure whether this should be at the level of projects, workspaces, or anything else…
Anyhow, keep up the good work overall and thanks for systematically asking and listening to your community! This is one of the things that makes Asana special.
Everything looks really washed out now… When working alongside other applications which mostly feature more vibrancy, it is then more difficult to differentiate between some of the colours in Asana
I’m sorry, but new colors are awful.
Have to agree with previous comments - I am not a fan of the new palette, yet some might like it. Could you provide option in settings (as per ligh/dark theme)?
By limiting the colour choices on tasks we are now struggling to distinguish between our work in a timeline view when viewing more than one Project. This is a problem for us. I would much prefer to have full control over what our company uses as colour pallets for custom fields. This change has made us less efficient not more. Please can we have control?
This is not a positive change. The colour palette was already limited, now the UI is harder to use and distinguish between project statuses etc due to muted colours. Give users more choice and control over colour.
I’ll join the critique. Not a positive change.
Color coding is first a tool, cosmetics second. If it is hard to distinguish between colors, then the change was detrimental (ex. yellow and orange are almost identical). I see no overall reason at all to enforce such a limit and reasons provided are debatable at best.
Unfortunately I will have to +1 to the negative comments, the new colors is making the user experience much worse and my entire team here at Google are sharing their frustration too.
I would love the see these changes reverted or at least making the new colors an option (disable by default). Considering the number of comments on this thread against this change, it seems reasonable to revert.
Thanks,
What I loved about Asana was the bright colors. These muted tones give it more of a depressive, humdrum feel, and I’m not a fan.
Hi all.
I got tired of Asana giving me headaches over this abysmal change, so I decided to change things myself.
If you are on Chrome, install this User CSS - Chrome Web Store
Then go to https://app.asana.com/. Now click the extension’s icon in Chrome (you might need to click the jigsaw puzzle icon first to find it).
Once the box slides open, paste this:
.AsanaMain {
- filter: saturate(1.9);*
}
.Menu.DropdownMenuButton-menu { - filter: saturate(1.9);*
}
And slide the OFF to the ON position. To close the box, click the icon again. Done.
1 week after the change of colors, I finally give you my opinion: Still not convinced!
Differentiating 2 projects became much more difficult as the tones are much more fade.
Apart from 4 extremely different colors, the recognition of tags, Stakeholders or project became much more complicated.
From a personal point of view: Why changing these fancy colors you had that made the visual difference and much attractive look? With such coloring I could switch to Jira seriously. Allow user to decide themselves with a message when logging letting them test and see the difference.
From a professional point of view: We are still waiting for better subtask integration, copy complete sections including tasks or button to display all subtasks without clicking on each task one by one and … we get that instead? Maybe there’s a problem of priority in your sprints.
EDIT: I forgot to mention the timeline view which makes it extremely difficult to distinguish between week days and weekend. Good luck preparing it as this grey is barely visible…
With the new colors, it feels like a filter has been put on the app. I find myself squinting and struggling to distinguish between projects, task priority, and other custom fields. I know change is painful, but this feels like a true usability issue and setback. At the very least there should be an option to toggle between this and the old color options.
Not appreciating the color scheme change–it now looks like all the milestones are in complete mode, when they are still open! Any chance you could go with a choice? Thank you for considering.
I have to agree with what seems to be the majority of commenters here. Before I realized that it asana that had made the change I thought something was wrong with my screen. As someone who uses the colours to EASILY identify certain things, it is very hard to differentiate between the pinks and purples, not to mention when a task is marked complete the difference is too subtle to tell between them. For a moment I thought all my uncompleted tasks had been marked off by someone else. Would love the option to pick a colour “theme” or our own custom palettes as people have suggested.