Trello – Can’t view the contents of an archived Trello list

You can give the coloured labels meaningful names, which I've found really helps.

It's not entirely obvious how to do this, at first:

1. When viewing a board, click on the grey Icon just to the left of the board's name
2. Select "Preferences"
3. You'll see the labels with names like "Green (default)"
4. Click on the name of a label, a type in something meaningful, and save it.

Now, when you click on a card, and then "Labels...", the name you specified is displayed on top of the Colour swatch.

This at least saves people from having to remember the meaning you've ascribed to the different colours.

You still only get 6 colours to play with, though, and I don't believe that you can change the colours themselves.

Other nice tricks

1. If you are hovering over a card, and hit the letter L on the keyboard, it pops up the list Labels, which is rather convenient.
2. The "Filter Cards..." option at top-right allows you to use these labels for filtering.

Edit 2011-11-19

I've just noticed that there's now a shorter route to renaming labels: At the bottom of the list of labels, there is now a link to "Edit labels (sic) titles":

I agree with your friend about not dividing up into separate boards by type of job.

With your examples such as 'Design ideas' etc, I think they really do fit naturally within different lists on the same Board. It's exactly the sort of usage that Joel demoed in multiple videos about Trello.

The only thing I can think of, to help manage very long lists, is to use Trello's Labels system to put categories on cards, and then use filtering. You should definitely give meaningful names to the default labels.

I wrote up some tips on how to use labels recently.

Having said that, fairly early on the Trello on Trello board got huge, and eventually they reduced the scope of it. So it's does seem to be a well-known problem.