change board background & accent colors, make labels more prominent, & more with the Beautify for Trello chrome extension.
The "stock" Trello board. Beautiful. Intuitive. Blue.
I stumbled onto Trello randomly - likely guided by my affinity for elegant, uncomplicated design. By the same token, I try to approach problem solving with an eye towards removing unnecessary complexities. Keeping up with who does what and how much progress is being made adds frustrating "uncertainty overhead" to collaborative work environments. Questions like "What system fixes can we apply by Tuesday?" and even "What restaurants should my girlfriend and I try next?" are made much simpler when a clear view of outstanding tasks and progress towards the goal is maintained. Here's where Trello comes in.
To quote the folks at FogCreek Software (makers of Trello)
Trello is a collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what's being worked on, who's working on what, and where something is in a process.
The beauty of the tool is in the way it combines powerful search and filtering with an otherwise limited feature set (an excellent example of how less can be more in software). By limiting new features, Trello remains pliable - I use it daily for tracking everything from software projects to vacation planning. More about Trello
What does Beautify do to Your Trello Boards?
Black control bar, custom background image, & a sneak peak at (currently under development) transparency mode.
With the extension installed, you can change the colors of the top (blue) control bar, the board background, and a few accent items (bottom scrollbar, control buttons). Furthermore, you can upload a tiled, stretched, or centered background image to add an even more personal touch to your boards. Install Beautify via the Chrome Web Store
Just Completed (v1.4): Labels can be 'stretched' to color the entire card. It makes them much more prominent, but limits you to one label per card before the colors get muddled.
Coming Soon (v1.5): "Transparency Mode" - an option to dim all but the active (mouse hover) list.
What's the hold up!? I've been hard at work with my actual job and other "side projects", but I haven't forgotten about this extension. As soon as I get time, I'll push another feature update along with a few key fixes. For those curious about what else I'm working on... see this post on my custom SugarCRM support portal.
This is open source software. Participation is welcome.
“Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. ‘Don’t bother us with politics’, respond those who don’t want to learn.”
An early sketch. Seems I couldn't manage straight lines, even with the graph paper.
At the time of this writing, the extension's user base numbers appx. 1,500. The Beautify Community Trello Board is usually pretty quiet, but I've found it an effective way to communicate with users of the extension. You can find the code (in its amateurish entirety) on GitHub. Reach out via twitter @mindofmoses or use the contact form on mindofmoses.com to get in touch. I'll set you up as a community board admin and make sure you can issue pull requests against the GitHub repository.
