color palettes that can be used across Kibana applications

[nreese]

One of the most requested Elastic Maps features is the ability to define/customize a color palette for categorical data.

The Maps team would like to solve this problem with a solution that spans Kibana applications, so that categorical values are styled consistently across embedded panels. When a category value is symbolized as a blue marker on the Map, the same category value is also symbolized as a blue bar in a bar chart, and a blue pie slice in a pie chart and so on.

The Maps team would like a solution where users can define the color palette once and use the same color palette across any embeddable that is symbolizing the same set of values. Embeddables should use the pre-defined color palette by default so data is symbolized consistently by default. Embeddables can allow local modifications to the color palette to satisfy user needs.

The Maps team would like to put a POC forward to move the conversation into an implementation. Today, Index Patterns are the only way to share field meta data across Kibana. We would like to enhance Index Pattern field's with an optional property, Color Palette.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-gis

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-canvas

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-design

[snide]

It doesn't 100% solve what you want, but @cchaos is working on some work in EUI around "theming" charts. For the moment it just provides some base palette rules to visualizations. This doesn't expose those palettes as some sort of saved constant in the way you describe, but we'd be super interested in solving this problem. I think what you're getting at would be extremely cool.

[nreese]

Chat questions from recent "creating dashboard" webinar asking about color themes for visualizations

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app-arch

[thomasneirynck]

For Maps, this may be good inspiration for color palettes http://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3

[cchaos]

Also related: elastic/elastic-charts#293

[nreese]

Closing, charts palette service is starting to provide this functionality.

[ryankeairns]

@nreese We've been considering how/where to add a base set of colorblind safe palettes for use across Kibana, as well. Can you point me at this charts palette service? Thank you.

[nreese]

Your plugin can access charts palette service by the exposed palettes
key in the start contract, https:/elastic/kibana/blob/master/src/plugins/charts/public/plugin.ts#L70

@flash1293 Can you provide some more details or documenation?

[flash1293]

@ryankeairns There's a little more documentation in the readme of the service: https:/elastic/kibana/blob/master/src/plugins/charts/public/services/palettes/README.md

However this is considered a starting point, not the finished service. Let me know if you have something specific in mind around this