Product UpdatesNew FeatureRoadmaps

Let's Talk: Color Palettes & Controls

Let's Talk: Color Palettes & Controls

Customizing your roadmap can be one of the most useful tools for building impactful, presentation-ready roadmaps - however, with more customization options come more opportunities for mistakes to happen and your beautiful roadmap can become an absolute nightmare in a very short time. To help provide teams with some peace of mind in their roadmaps, we're excited to highlight several major updates to our color palettes which are now available for all users.

Color Palette Usage Warnings

An image of the color palette usage warning in a blue infobox under the palette selection dropdown, showing a palette called Roadmunk Brand Colors is being used on 15 roadmaps and 31 unique views.

We've seen it many times before: you're getting ready for a presentation later in the day and suddenly you realize that your roadmap has been changed. Whether it's colors mapped to new field values or brand new colors added into the view, these types of changes can be frustrating, destructive, and, most importantly, complete accidents 99% of the time.

In order to provide teams with some peace of mind in their roadmaps, we have introduced a few solutions which we think will help to to better communicate the impact of changes to a colour palette from inside your roadmap.

The first change is our new Custom Palette Warning, which provides users with a real-time count of roadmaps and views which are using the selected palette elsewhere. This provides immediate feedback to team members, letting them know how their changes to certain elements of the palette can impact other roadmaps across the account.

Lock Color Palettes to Prevent Unwanted Changes

An image highlighting the color palette lock feature in action on the colors panel in a roadmap, with text saying 'Owner has locked the color palette for this roadmap' beside a lock icon.

For users on high-traffic roadmaps, one of the most common frustrations we've heard about is the ability for any editor to update the color palettes within views. While this may seem trivial for some users, many teams see it as the difference between a successful presentation and an absolute disaster.

All the drama of color palettes aside - we realized that we needed to provide users with something that could help them to better manage and control the setup of palettes on some of their higher-traffic roadmaps, which is why we've created our new Lock Color Palettes toggle.

Built into the Sharing Settings menu, this toggle prevents any users who are not the roadmap owner from editing the Color & Palette Settings for all views within that roadmap. In our early access program for this feature, users responded positively to this change - with this rather simple control providing some much-needed peace of mind and ensuring consistency of the customizations across all roadmap views.

Updates to Default Palettes

For the past 8 years, we've had three default palettes available to all users in Roadmunk: Citrus, Groovy, & Ocean. After much discussion and debate around our next steps in this area, we've decided to make two major changes.

The first is the renaming of our current Ocean palette to Pastel. We feel this name better reflects the bright, soft springtime colors which make this palette so unique and are excited to finally get this change live for all users. If you're currently using this palette, the change will not impact your roadmap and the palette name should update automatically in your Format panel.

Our second update is one that's been a long time coming! One of our most popular requests from users is to bring new palettes into the fold which provide richer, brighter colors for their roadmaps - so we've done just that. We're pleased to introduce the following new default palettes into Roadmunk:

  • Autumn - A stunning collection of rich deep hues, with vibrant pops of color intermingled into the palette.
  • Neon - An effervescent collection of bright colors combined to create a unique and energetic roadmap.
  • Ocean - A collection of deep and muted oceanic hues which inspire calm and easy-reading.

We hope that these new default palettes and better controls for your existing custom palettes provide you and your team with endless possibilities for creativity in your roadmap. To learn more about setting up Color Palettes in Roadmunk, make sure to check out our recently updated article in our Help Center.