Per-project visual identity in Cowork: accent color, icon, or cover image

Preflight Checklist

• [x] I have searched existing requests and this feature hasn't been requested yet
• [x] This is a single feature request (not multiple features)

Problem Statement

I use Cowork as a set of persistent agent workspaces rather than a place for one-off tasks. Each project has its own instructions, files, connectors, and scheduled tasks — bookkeeping, legal review, real estate analysis, farm operations, content, household maintenance, fitness, and several more. Thirteen projects at the moment, and growing.

On the projects surface they are visually identical. Same card, same size, same color, differentiated only by a text label. Once the list is long enough to scroll, switching between them stops being a glance and becomes a read-every-title operation. I know exactly which workspace I want before I look at the screen, and the interface makes me parse text to find it anyway.

This is a wayfinding problem, not an aesthetics one. Text labels are fine at four projects and poor at thirteen. The people most affected are the ones who have invested the most in Cowork, so the friction scales with engagement rather than against it.

Proposed Solution

Three options, ordered by implementation cost. Any one of them helps; the first alone probably captures most of the value.

Per-project accent color. A swatch selector on project creation and in project settings. Tints the card border, the project header, and the sidebar entry. Drawing from a curated palette rather than a hex picker keeps it consistent with Claude's design language.

Per-project icon or emoji. The pattern Notion, Slack, and Linear all use for workspace differentiation. An emoji picker is cheap; a small curated icon set is nicer.

Per-project cover image. User-uploaded, shown on the project card and as a header band inside the project. Highest effort, highest payoff for anyone with visually distinct domains of work.

Alternative Solutions

Emoji prefixed to the project name. Works today and I've done it. Helps, but the emoji renders at label size and sits inside a wall of text, so it's a weak signal compared to a colored border or filled card.
Stylus userstyle targeting project UUIDs in the href. I have this working. Real limitations: web only, so mobile and desktop are unaffected; breaks whenever build-hashed class names change; and it's a per-machine setup I have to redo on every device.
Third-party extensions (ClaudeBuff, Claudium). Same web-only constraint, plus I'd rather not run a third-party extension with DOM read access on a tool holding my business financials and legal work.

Priority

Low - Nice to have

Feature Category

Other

Use Case Example

A normal morning: I open Cowork to check what the overnight scheduled tasks produced, move into the bookkeeping workspace to categorize the week's transactions, jump to real estate to run numbers on a property under evaluation, then to farm operations to review a planting schedule. Four context switches in an hour, each one requiring me to scan a grid of identical cards.

With per-project accent colors — say clay for books, slate blue for real estate, green for the farm, plum for legal — those switches become recognition instead of recall. I'd stop reading the grid and start pointing at it. That's a small thing that happens ten times a day.

The cover image version goes further: a photo of the actual property, the actual field, the actual thing the workspace is about. Cowork projects are the first Claude surface that feels like a place I return to rather than a conversation I start, and places benefit from looking like themselves.

Additional Context

Precedent: Notion (accent colors and icons per workspace and page), Slack (per-workspace theming, which exists specifically because power users belong to many), Linear (curated theme presets rather than infinite options), Things 3 (small curated accent palette). The Linear and Things approach — a tasteful fixed set — seems most aligned with Claude's design sensibility.
Technical note: for the accent-color version this looks like a nullable field on the project record plus a CSS custom property scoped to the project container. The interface already supports light/dark theming, so the token infrastructure exists.
Compounding with #55635: if per-project accents drew from the same curated palette as a global accent picker, the two would read as one coherent system rather than two disconnected color settings.
Not asking for: custom CSS, arbitrary hex input, or per-project font and layout overrides. Curated options only.