[Lens] Should Lens use colors from shared color service?

[wylieconlon]

The color mapping service is used by multiple visualizations (but not Lens), so that when two visualizations are shown in a dashboard, they use the same color scheme. If there are any duplicate values in the visualizations, they get the same color. This works because there is a default Kibana palette which visualizations share today- but Lens doesn't use the default palette or the color service.

The benefit of using the color service in Lens would be that if multiple Lens visualizations are embedded in a dashboard, colors would be shared like other visualizations. However, there are some open questions about how this would work.

• Can we have a dashboard legend instead of a chart-level legend?
• Should each Lens visualization have a theme input which can be passed in from the dashboard?
• If themes are passed in from the dashboard, does it make sense to have the Lens editor support styling options at all?
• Does Lens use the right default today? I find that our default colors are too noisy for most use cases.
• We want to support color palettes in Lens as well as in Kibana as a whole. If we implement it first in Lens, will that prevent us from making a wider change in Kibana?

This issue is intended to discuss how Lens will use colors, which is related to many other issues:

• Colors on y-axis
• Color palettes in Kibana
• Color palettes in Kibana 2
• Beyond palettes

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-design (Team:Design)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app (Team:KibanaApp)

[cchaos]

To clarify are you talking strictly about just the color palette values or how they're mapped to indice field values?

[wylieconlon]

@cchaos the color mapping service that we have today does both of those things. To list what it does more explicitly:

• The color service provides a base palette of 7 colors
• The color service provides a way of extending the palette using hue shifting
• The color service gives each unique name a unique color
• The color service also makes sure that when you see the same value in multiple charts, each chart displays the same color. For example, if "OS X" is blue in one chart, it's blue in every chart.
• Because the color service is used for dashboards in general, the colors used in any specific visualization are only a subset of the overall colors- this can look weird

Given that this is how it works today, would we want to use this approach in Lens? If not, which parts of the service would we want to change?

[wylieconlon]

TSVB is also not using the color service: this issue I opened highlights the issue that Lens has as well, which is that it's doing a custom color scheme.

[wylieconlon]

Closing as we have made a decision about this: #81976