Working with Color Palettes
Terms to Know
Format Panel - The central menu for organizing the layout of your roadmap. Here you can select your headers, colors, and completely customize the display of your roadmap visualization.
Field Values - The individual values that make up a field in Roadmunk. For example, you can have a field called Status, and it’s field values are Future, Soon, Up Next, In Progress, Complete.
Legend - A small tab that appears on the roadmap view which outlines the applied palette colors and their associated field values.
Swatch - A single color within the palette. This is represented by the single-color rectangular box beside your field values and make up the individual colors of your palette.
Color palettes are a great way to add a finishing customized touch to your roadmap. Roadmaps can be enhanced with a native palette, or a custom palette can be created to really showcase your branding. To use different colors in a roadmap, select the Colors tab in your formatting menu from either the Timeline or Swimlane view.
Setting Up Color Palettes in Roadmaps
In order to set up colors on a roadmap, you first need to select a field to Color By from the respective dropdown menu in the Format Panel. Any List Field (whether Account or Roadmap Level) that you've added to your roadmap can be used for this. Roadmaps colors are directly linked to the values in the user-selected list field and can be used as either an additional data pivot or a way to make a roadmap more visually appealing.
Working with Default Palettes
Roadmunk has 6 default palette options available to all users: Citrus, Groovy, Pastel, Autumn, Neon, and Ocean. While these palettes have fixed colors, the field values associated with each color can be reassigned by dragging and dropping the values to the corresponding field value.
The maximum number of field values our default color palettes accommodate is 12. If you have more than 12 unique field values for the field you are coloring by, you should create a custom palette instead so each field value can be assigned a unique color.
Working with Custom Palettes
This feature is only available on Business, Professional, and Enterprise plans. For more details on available features in other plans, click here.
Custom Palettes remove a number of the limitations that our Default Palettes have - including any limitations on number of colors in the palette and the ability to adjust the colors in the palette. Only Account Admins and Collaborators can create and update Custom Palettes, and users will require either Owner or Editor permissions on the roadmaps they're viewing to change the assigned field values for each color in a palette.
Creating Custom Palettes
To create a Custom Palette, open the Format Panel to the Colors tab and click into Palette dropdown. From here, you should be able to click the + Palette option at the bottom of the list, which will open a small setup window.
From here you can setup a custom name for the palette, which will be visible to all users with Editor access or higher on all roadmaps in your account. You can also select an existing palette to use to copy the colors from, if you're looking to build something visually similar to an existing palette.
Setting Up Colors in Custom Palettes
In order to select colors for each field value, you can click into a swatch on the palette and select a color using one of three methods:
Color Picker: You can manually adjust the colors and tones using the color picker that appears when you click into a swatch. The color you've chosen will appear on the Select button at the bottom, which can be clicked to apply the color to that swatch.
Hex Codes: If your team already has a list of approved colors that align with your company or brand, you can enter the custom hex codes for those colors in the input box provided below the color picker. When a valid hex code is entered, you will see the color appear on the Select button at the bottom, which can be clicked to apply the color to that swatch.
Color Name: As an alternative to using hex codes, you can also use color names. For a full list of color names available, please refer to this list. When a valid color name is entered, you will see the color appear on the Select button at the bottom, which can be clicked to apply the color to that swatch.
While the order of colors in the palette is applied globally, the order of the field values assigned to colors in the palette is specified on a view-by-view basis and will not carry over unless the view is duplicated.
Custom Color Palette Warnings
When working with Custom Palettes, a warning message will be visible for all possible editors inside the Format Panel. This warning outlines the number of roadmaps and views that the selected color palette is actively being used in.
Managing & Visualizing Color Palettes
It’s important to note that color palettes are global, meaning they are shared across all users and all roadmaps in an account. Team members and other roadmaps can also use the saved color scheme, and other users will automatically see them in the dropdown menu alongside the native palettes.
Renaming & Deleting Color Palettes
Custom Palettes can be easily renamed or deleted by clicking on their respective icons in the higlighted section in the screenshot above. As noted above, only Account Admins and Collaborators can rename and delete Custom Palettes.
Understanding Color Palettes in Visualizations
When working in your roadmap visualization, color palette details can be quickly viewed via the Legend. This collapsible tab is available in the top right corner of the both the Timeline and the Swimlane views. The Legend will display all actively used colors on the view, along with a list of Linked Item connector lines when working in the Timeline view. Additionally, the legend will automatically display on any published or exported roadmap.
Locking Color Palette Controls
To prevent unwanted changes to your customization settings, roadmap owners can lock their color palettes on a roadmap-by-roadmap basis. From the Sharing Settings menu, users can select the Lock Color Palette option to enable this feature. After this feature is toggled on, the currently applied field values will lock to their respective swatches on the palette and prevent users outside of the owner from making changes to those associated values.
While this feature limits the ability to adjust color palette settings for associated field values within the views on a single roadmap, this does not prevent users in other roadmaps from changing the swatches on the palette itself. Please ensure that palettes are named appropriately and that teams are referencing the color palette warnings to avoid unintentional changes to other roadmaps.