Remove colour overlay from course cards that have an image

[stuart_ryan]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

Howdy all,

Firstly I have to say the new course cards image feature is awesome and a great leap forward. I have been using it a bit now and have a small request for a future revision.

When a course is given an image for the course card on a user's dashboard, I would really like to see the colour overlay removed (so that the image does not looked washed out with the user selected colour).

Ideally, I would love to see this configurable on an account level rather than an individual course level, but that is just from an administrator's perspective.

Just to visualise this more, the current behaviour with a couple of different colours:

And the ideal/requested behaviour:

Additional thoughts:

I do realise the colour is important for a few different areas in relation to the course, so perhaps the bottom bar could be extended as a border around the entire card (just as one example).

Many thanks  team,

Keep up the awesome work!

Comments from Instructure

For more information, please read through the Canvas Production Release Notes (2017-05-13) 

[laurakgibbs]

Or the calendar font color could be used for the currently black-text display below the link which simply shows the course title. 🙂

[laurakgibbs]

I added another blog post today about how faculty can search Flickr to quickly and easy find a really cool image to use for their course card. I really (REALLY) hope we can get faculty to take advantage of this option; I would definitely want to count "use of course cards" as a metric of success in our adoption. I wonder if our Canvas admin can get a quick read on the number of courses that have course card images... Hmmm...

Here's the post:

Teaching with Canvas: Course Images and Flickr

I included this screenshot in the post: kudos to whoever at Canvas built this nifty Flickr integration!

[DrNufer]

Perhaps changing the color from white to off-white would be easy for some people.  Something like: #E4E3E3

[DrNufer]

Two months later and we're well past the 7-2

[DrNufer]

Your blog is great!

[laurakgibbs]

Thanks! This is our first semester with Canvas, so I am sharing what I learn as I go along. It's a HUGE change for us; we had D2L for over 10 years before this switch.

[stuart_ryan]

To keep everyone in the loop: I have escalated through my CSM as I would at least like to hear a little about what has been done thus far as part of the information gathering stage and try to get this back on track.

[laurakgibbs]

Thanks for all you are doing! This is my first experience with the Canvas feature process in action. Maybe there will even be a fix available when we start classes in January. That would be really great!

It's Thanksgiving holiday in the U.S. ... but Australia is not on holiday, of course, so you can carry on with our quest for freedom from the COLOUR overlay even while school is out here. 🙂

[deangelisa]

I set color #FFFFFF and the picture is displayed as if it were behind a colorless veil

[laurakgibbs]

That's what I am doing also, but for art images, they look very washed out:

Plus, when you choose "white" as the color overlay, it also defaults to "white" for the lettering on the calendar, which is not good. When you look at a calendar if you have white as the color, it looks like it is blank (white lettering on white background) - this is a screenshot of the agenda view of the calendar for a course with FFFFFF color overlay:

Only when you highlight can you tell there really is text there:

I would say that alone is a serious enough design flaw that something should be fixed about this right away! The obvious answer is to disentangle the choice of the color overlay (choose a color OR none) from the calendar display color (choose a color, default to black).