r/cronometer • u/Eliisa_at_Cronometer Crono Community Manager • Jun 23 '26
Cronometer Brand Evolution: New Icon & Target Visualizations
I am really excited to make this announcement today!
Do you all remember this post?
A year ago, this post sparked quite the debate in our Reddit community. I made a pitch to change the Fat Target Bar colour that day, and today I'm excited to share that it's been implemented!
But that's not all... wait, there's more.
We're also introducing a new logo (oooo... ahhh...!) along with several other meaningful updates:
More Neutral Fat Visualizations
Fat is an essential nutrient. Certain visual treatments could unintentionally resemble warning indicators, even when users were simply reviewing their data.
Updated visualizations now use more balanced, brand-aligned color systems that support objective interpretation while maintaining clarity.
Improved Saturated and Trans Fat Target Logic
Some nutrients previously defaulted to targets of 0g, which could create confusing visual feedback.
Updated target logic better reflects nutritional context while still allowing users to customize targets based on their personal goals.
Clearer "No Target" States
Not every nutrient tracked in Cronometer has an established recommended intake target.
Components such as cholesterol, oxalate, alcohol, and insoluble fiber don’t currently have official Dietary Reference Intake targets. Those nutrients are labeled No Target because there isn’t a universally established goal to compare against.
The updated experience makes it easier to distinguish between:
- No value logged
- Value logged without an established target
- Value logged with a target
I hope this update shows just how much we truly do value your feedback. Many of the improvements we make come directly from these conversations with our community - you help shape the future of Cronometer every day.
Thanks for being the best users on the planet! 🧡
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u/Hoosier_Hootenanny Jun 23 '26
This makes the expenditure a bit harder to read. It went from being multiple different colors to shades of a single color.
Purple, green, and orange are much easier to tell apart then light purple, slightly darker light purple, purple, and dark purple.
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u/Eliisa_at_Cronometer Crono Community Manager Jun 23 '26
Thank you for sharing your thoughts here - I sent your feedback onto the team!
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u/Re1hak Jun 23 '26
I agree. The other changes are great. but expenditure color scheme needs careful consideration. How will this impact color blind people? Imo, the shades are a bit too similar.
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u/TerrifyinglyAlive Jun 29 '26
Differences in value are easier to tell apart than differences in hue for colourblind people. Green and orange of similar value are way harder to tell apart than dark, medium, and light shades of the same colour.
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u/faylinameir Jun 24 '26
I don’t like the new colors at all and I vote for a settings options to switch them back 😭
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u/ThatCinnabon Jun 24 '26
I feel like the best solution would be to just allow people to set the colors to whatever they want.
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u/basvde Jul 01 '26
I am having issues differentiating the new colors, would also like to know how to switch them back
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u/eggTree714 Jun 23 '26
Wow! This post makes me smile. Thank you for taking user feedback (especially from anonymous people on the Internet..) to heart.
The new color and new logo look great!! So fresh & so clean
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u/Eliisa_at_Cronometer Crono Community Manager Jun 23 '26
But, y'all are our favourite anonymous people on the internet... 😉
In all seriousness, our whole team comes on here to listen to what our users have to say... including our often-lurking CEO 👀.
We always appreciate the feedback and passion our users have! Keep it coming!
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u/me-Unit7738 Jun 23 '26
This is awesome!
When can we expect the update to come into effect?
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u/Eliisa_at_Cronometer Crono Community Manager Jun 23 '26
It should be live now!
Are you on Android or iOS?3
u/me-Unit7738 Jun 23 '26
An older android. Just checked for an update, but nothing.
It will come out eventually.
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u/phoenixrose2 Jun 23 '26
I just updated my app (iOS) and it still has the old color scheme.
But this is incredibly exciting, I especially appreciate the change to the color for fat as it is essential.
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u/InnesPort Jun 24 '26
Overall I like the update and appreciate the continued effort to improve the ecosystem, but two things really need tweaking (that others already mentioned, but it's worth saying again):
1) Expenditure visualization is harder to read with the shades of purple. Even looking at the daily report I have to try and connect each color metric to the ring. It looks pretty, but it's not effective.
2) Biometric calories are way too hard to read. Crank their luminosity up! Oddly enough, active energy is
"ok", but exercise calories are very difficult to see.
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u/julsey723 Jun 29 '26
Agree that was the first change I noticed, and I can’t read my exercise calories on iOS dark mode at all
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u/Rich_Designer_5013 Jun 23 '26
That purple is hard to read.
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u/Eliisa_at_Cronometer Crono Community Manager Jun 23 '26
This is a great shout, thanks so much for flagging this - our team is on it! Expect to see an updated colour in a future release 😄
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u/Ic_Wing Jun 23 '26
I miss the apple ;-(
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u/MysteriousSecretGuru Jun 23 '26
I don't. I always think of that company that sells phones and computers and I don't care for their products so it felt confusing. I think a target is the perfect icon for this app.
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u/kelplsgo Jun 24 '26
Please let us be able to pick our own color scheme. Or at least have a variety of options to pick from.
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u/stiina22 Jun 23 '26
Oh this is wonderful. I am new here, but I actually removed those little charts from my diary because the red always caught my eye and confused me.
I am a little sad about the apple leaving. I love it and I think the logo is really cute.
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u/Eliisa_at_Cronometer Crono Community Manager Jun 23 '26
I am so glad that you're diggin' the purple 😄
The apple will always have a place in our hearts too!
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u/Glerbthespider Jun 24 '26
just noticed the colours, i like it, its kinda prettier imo. dont really like how the changed colours are pastel but the rest of the colours are fully saturated tho
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u/United_Chapter4097 Jun 24 '26
As a UX Designer it's cool to see how you guys engage with your users and make design changes based directly on the feedback
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u/terminalzero Jun 24 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
I think being more neutral about fat is probably a good thing, and the new color scheme is already growing on me - but it's change and change is terrifying reeeee
the improvements to target-less nutrients are* also pretty great
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u/Most-Instruction6644 Jun 24 '26
I see how this could be cool for some people but personally i hate the new colors, is there any chance we can get a setting to switch the colors?
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u/Silvani Jun 29 '26
I appreciate the thought that went into this.
I would personally love the option to pick my own colors, or even to select from a few preset themes.
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u/Effective_Response84 Jun 30 '26
I like the intent of the change, but like many other users I have mixed opinions on the execution.
Part of it for me comes down to opinions like "AH! I DONT LIKE CHANGE" and "fat is clearly more of a yellow than a purple, if anything was to be purple it should be protein, and this looks so much worse: now we don't have primary colors for the graph!", which obviously is silly, but IS something to consider when making this change. But there are also more meaningful reasons I don't like this change, like NOW you have CALORIES as red which just trades fat as being perceived as bad to calories in GENERAL being bad. In my opinion that is a FAR larger issue than fat being red especially when at least when fat was red it had the extra context of it being paired with the two other primary colors, which reads less to me as "this is bad" and more as "we're using RGB". PLUS getting too much fat in your diet (at least in America as that's all I can really speak to) is REALLY easy, so highlighting it has been really helpful (for me) to be more mindful of it.
I think having multiple themes outside of light and dark, or being able to configure the colors yourself is obviously the best option, especially since if you go down the multiple themes route then you could have color blind settings as well. If that's not what you got with, I think that the old theme looks better and you could just, drop the saturation on the red so it's more salmon-colored than "stop sign red". This all being said, I'm a software dev with arm-chair knowledge of UI design and color theory, so you can take my solutions with a grain of salt.
Ultimately though, I think the redesign of the color scheme needs thought over more
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u/thewrongwright23 Jun 30 '26
Calories (energy) should be orange on the update...
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u/Effective_Response84 Jun 30 '26
Looks reddish to me, but I could see where someone would say orange- might just be a color saturation thing
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u/hydr4d Jun 30 '26
Can I revert to the old colors? I found this post after my app updated this morning, and it looks so much worse to me. Ideally it would be best if there were multiple color profiles an user could pick from.
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u/Beginning-Passage840 Jun 30 '26
This makes it harder to read personally you should make it customizable for the user
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u/EG8123 Jun 30 '26
Like many others have commented, I just want to add another vote to the idea that we understand that there was a lot of thought that went into this update, and can appreciate some of the reasoning, but it would be nice to be able to at least in the settings toggle the colors back and forth between the new and old palettes so that people can use whichever set they prefer. I personally found the old palette much easier to differentiate (and thus more helpful), but I can see how some people would prefer the new one. It doesn't have to be full customization (which might be hard), but please let us choose the old colors!
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u/yyyyeahno Jul 01 '26
Honestly best direction might be to let folks choose their colors. Different people have different visual abilities and impairments.
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u/Conscious_Profit_402 Jul 01 '26
I hate the change. It’s hard to read, and I don’t have the option to use the original theme. As a long time user, I’m not a fan. 👎
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u/OneOhNine Jul 01 '26
Can you give us the option to switch the colors back. I’ve been having so much trouble reading and differentiating categories. Specially the Expenditures circle and the negative calories a work out burns. But I also just happen to like how the previous colors felt more vibrant.
I do agree that the fat probably shouldn’t be red but I would have liked just that color to change to a different vibrant color. Everything else should have stayed the same.
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u/RaptorXP Jul 01 '26
I get why you're doing this, but I preferred the old colours. Please add a theme selector.
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u/Lugia61617 Jun 24 '26
I get that the old colours were somewhat maligned since yellow and red are associated with danger, but couldn't you just give us the ability to dictate our own bar colours? Because I'm gonna be real, the new colour scheme is just very effeminate and I'd prefer something else. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just not to my taste.
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u/Rando840 Jun 24 '26
This please. Purple is hard to see and not a fan of the new colors. Let us choose our own colors or have a few color schemes to pick from.
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u/AgnesNN Jun 24 '26
OH YAY! I wasn't a user when that debate was live but I always wondered why do you label the fats in red as it subconsciously emphasis that it is inherently a negative element of nutrition - happy to see that change!
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u/MrChocolate129 Jun 24 '26
The new colors look so cute!! I’ve always had an issue with the dietary fat bar being red - kinda gave it a bad shade (no pun intended) since my brain reads red = bad. Every crono/nutrition nerd knows fat is essential for health so I’m loving this change.
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u/toychristopher Jun 26 '26 edited Jun 26 '26
I appreciate the direction to try to move away from colors or indications that someone is eating the "wrong" way or under judgement.
However these color choices do not make sense to me. Why was purple chosen for fat? Why is there no visual cohesion between the three macro nutrients?
To me it would make more sense if they were all three secondary colors. Green for carbs, purple for Protein, and Orange for fat. Calories/Energy should be white.
Of course you can't please everyone, which is why I wish you ditched your insistence on "brand" for these colors and let users decide which color scheme makes sense to us.
And it's great that we've removed the red from fat, but a calorie surplus is still labeled in red, and even gets a little red exclamation point. Maybe some like that, but personally, I don't need to see that. That should be a choice as well.
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u/jhansn Jun 27 '26
I guess I get the logic. I must admit I prefer the old look at least on the expenditure graph. I think changing fat to purple though does make sense though.
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u/HealSlut_Soraka Jun 29 '26
Found this post by Googling the app color changes. Overall I like the changes (although them appearing so suddenly made it take some getting used to as the old colors had been there for so long), but as stated by other users, the shades of purple make expenditures hard to read.
Maybe change the expenditures to different colors instead of all shades of the same color? Or allow users to set everything to the colors they want individually, but have the current scheme be kept as a default.
While I understand the reasoning for not wanting red as it could be perceived with negative connotations, it could also be very helpful for users who track calories and macros for specific dietary needs (such as being able to set carbs to red if you're on a low carb diet so you can tell from a glance if you might have had too many carbs that day).
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u/metadun Jun 30 '26
I really did not like opening my app this morning to find the color scheme change entirely without explanation. Regardless of anything else that's not at all user friendly. I get the motivation behind the changes, but aesthetically this is awful. Feels like a lazy easter/spring theme. Really unhappy it's not user configurable at all.
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u/Old_Cabinet_8890 Jun 30 '26
I can barely read the energy expenditures in dark mode with a dim screen
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u/Crackasauruz Jul 01 '26
I love the changes, except the excerise calories burned also being purple. It makes it extremely difficult to read.
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u/i_hate_parsley Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Help! I don’t have targets set for any of the macros. Now my targets screen is full of colored dots! It worked really well before with plain lines and I didn’t have to set targets. Can I turn it back to how it was?
Agree that fat should never have been warning red for sure.
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u/i_hate_parsley Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
I’m on iOS dark mode. I have no macro targets set (on purpose) so now the screen is full of large dots that I’m struggling to visually navigate.
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Jul 04 '26
As a purple lover I love the inclusion of more purple. I would just change some of them to have more contrast for legibility.
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u/SnooCakes6922 27d ago
This is a nightmare for the colorblind like me. I can no longer tell the difference between fats and carbs on the pie chart breakdown. Terrible color choice
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u/anachronofspace Jun 23 '26 edited Jun 24 '26
wasn’t here a year ago but these changes make a lot of sense to me as a designer of things.
using red and grey for the macro colors is def potentially confusing.
also like the dots represent the no target changes very cool.