Nick [Strategic Design]

Explain the problem as you see it

I often find myself in situations where I would like to be able to quickly ascertain the prevalence of type of a thing at a glance, but all of the instances have the same color, despite being very different contextually. This is very common for meetings and tasks, where I have no reason to create a separate tag for each of the dozen varieties, but would love to be able to quickly understand whether all of my meetings or tasks for a day are the same type/org/project, or different one.

Why is this a problem for you?

Especially in certain contexts, I am frequently only looking at things from one supertag, so the biggest difference between entities is not which tag is being used, but something else. But the thing that requires the most differentiation looks the more similar than anything else.

An example:
I'm looking at a calendar view of everything that must be done for the week. My brain is categorizing by project, but the interface is categorizing by tag. I want tasks and meetings for Project X to be yellow, those related to Project Y to be blue, and Project Z to be red. I would rather tasks, projects, meetings, etc., be differentiated some other way (e.g., size, shape, position). Color is the most fundamental and flexible categorical differentiator at-a-glance.

Suggest a solution

I have no idea about how this ought to be implemented. Sometimes I don't care which colors are used—I just want them to be different—other times I would like a consistent pattern across experiences. And since no one else has asked for this (that I'm aware of), this might be a very fringe user need. Should the colors be set manually? Based on a field value? Should it be a global setting, or per tag?

It feels like having a supertag setting that can be set explicitly or tied to a field might be do-able.