Consider adding color and text size customizations to all text-based blocks.

[kjellr]

Currently, it's possible to change the background color and text color for paragraph blocks:

Those options are not available for other text-based blocks though: headings, lists, quotes, preformatted, subheadings, verse.

Conceptually, it's not immediately clear why those settings are not available to all text blocks.

Suggestion

For consistency, I think we should consider adding these options to other text-based blocks on a case by case basis. Here are some initial thoughts:

Headings
It probably doesn't make sense to include text size controls here, as it would upset the type size hierarchy of all the headings. But I think color options could make sense.

Lists
From a visual perspective, lists are essentially just a series of paragraphs with bullets/numbers — it seems like users should be able to make text size + color customizations to list blocks.

Quotes
Quotes have their own Block Styles, so I'd understand that these settings could get really complicated and messy. Color options might make sense though.

Preformatted
I think both size and color options could work here. It's worth noting that the description of this block says "Add text that respects your spacing and tabs, and also allows styling." (emphasis mine), but there are currently no styling options.

Subheadings
If we add text options here, I think this block might lose it's reason for existing. (It renders as just a normal paragraph with specific styles anyway). But I do think that users would expect to be able to edit the styles here.

Verse
This is visually identical to the paragraph block, so I think it should have the same size and color options.

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Also, assuming we adopted any of these suggestions, those settings should carry over when using Block Transforms — if you were to transform a paragraph block to a list block, you should carry over its font size and color settings.

[ZebulanStanphill]

Quotes should become a block that uses nested Paragraph, List, and Heading blocks in the future. See #6520. So that pretty much covers having colored text in those, except for perhaps general background color.

I think the Heading and List blocks should definitely have text and background color options. I do not feel as strongly about the Preformatted and Verse blocks, but I think those should have text and background color options as well. I mainly feel this way because, while page building, you are likely to end up using various background colors provided by sections, and you will want to make your text readable on those backgrounds. The Heading, List, and Paragraph blocks would be the most-used in page building out of all the standard text blocks, and I think they definitely should have text color options.

I think the Subheading block does not need any styling options as subheadings would probably be expected to look the same across a website, not being used much (if at all) in page building contexts (it is mainly intended for things like blog posts and news articles), with any variations being supplied by themes. I would not be opposed to it having color options as well, though.

[mikemcalister]

Agreed that the headings probably shouldn't include text size settings, as this could be detrimental to the visual hierarchy set by themes. However, headings and lists should at least have color options, as the paragraph block does. It should be consistent, so either the text-based blocks get colors or none of them get colors.

[chrisvanpatten]

Got another request for this in #10377 which also sort of brought up something interesting… some themes will give different elements different sizes by default, e.g. twentythirteen styles <blockquote> in a slightly larger font size.

Would themes need to be able to set different font size options per-block? Or perhaps a default font size per block? I could see this getting messy pretty quickly.

[riemerta6]

To add onto this thread I have a few suggestions after building a couple of sites with the Gutenberg plugin. I noticed that there are a few blocks that could really use theme support for colors. Here's what I think makes the most sense (open to other ideas of course):

• Heading block: Text color
• Column block: Background color for wrapper, Background color for individual columns (less important)
• List block: Text color
• Cover block: Text color
• Separator block: Background color

Let me know what you think!