The new default font colour

It seems you’ve had a few questions about this already, but I just wanted to be sure.

I opened up an old Mockup in the new version, and noticed that now my labels were set to the mid-grey, there’s much less contrast between them and a disabled label which is showing nearby. They’re both shades of grey, and that makes it harder to determine that one is disabled and one is active.

This is not ideal, but I can easily change the labels to black if I want to (Even though this change requires more work on my end, I’m sure you all did plenty of research and found that a mid-grey is a better label colour than black, so I don’t begrudge the change!).

The bigger problem that this change highlighted is that some controls don’t have a text colour control at all. So even if I change my labels back to black, for example, there’s no way to set the colour in my Tree Pane, for example.

Is there a reason that universal text colour controls aren’t present by default? As far as I can tell, almost all objects with text come with universal controls for Bold, Italic, Underline, and Font Size, but not colour.

I’ve seen the other posts I read about the font colour that there is a new version which addresses this - could you go into a bit more detail about HOW this is addressed, so I’ll know if it solves my particular issue.

As always, I’m fascinated to hear the reasons behind changes like these, so if you feel like sharing, share away!

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I also find this a bit dubious. I never even thought about font colour in most of these widgets before, which suggests to me that black was the “right” choice. Now I find myself wanting to change the colour, and only now realise it’s not possible.

Hey Guys,

I am sorry for the continued hassle this change caused, we definitely didn’t want to make extra work for everyone.

We had been talking about lightening up the default project color for a while, but it’s obvious that we went too light, and I’m really sorry about that. The build we have at https://balsamiq.com/download/next has the default color set to #333 (rather than the #555 on 3.2.2).

This (and project colors in general) is something we are still actively discussing, though. It’s on the agenda for Monday’s UX meeting.

If you can, test out the build on /next, and let us know if you’d still like it to be darker.

Hi all,

We just released our latest official version (3.2.3) including the color improvement! Thanks again for the report.

You can get the new version (3.2.3) here:
https://balsamiq.com/download/

And the complete release notes are here:
http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2015/10/13/resizealternates/