Custom Color Schemes in Visualisations

[jgough]

Sometimes I want to use different color schemes/palettes to highlight data better, for example gradients. Although it is possible to change the color of a series individually within visualisations it makes it tedious when using a Histogram Aggregation and have to select a color for each one. I end up having to manually specify colors by modifying the URL for the visualisation as picking custom colors is not an option. Here's an example of a visualisation with a custom color scheme (with manually specified colors)

Compare this to the default:

I'm looking for:

• Ability when creating a visualiation to change the color scheme from a list of predefined options in a dropdown
• Ability to use gradients of predefined intervals, e.g. a red gradient with 10 intervals
• Ability to specify custom color schemes, possibly in advanced settings.

Perhaps some of the palettes from Vega here: https://vega.github.io/vega/docs/schemes/ could be of interest

There is talk of customisation of individual colors here #1241, but this request is for updating all colors at once.

[joshuarrrr]

Thanks @jgough, I think the examples you shared speak volumes. I agree that gradients or color sets are an important aspect to consider along with the design work @btzeng has already done in #1241.

[ahopp]

Thanks @jgough I think this is a great callout and something we should add to the eventual work associated with #1241 since they are solving for parallel problems.

@btzeng can you take a look and see if you have any ideas for assigning color palettes (e.g., some grouping of discrete and continuous color encodings) that can be assigned to a visualization. I think we would need to have a means for both categorical (discrete) color assignments as well as simple gradient (continuous) assignments as P0 with all others (e.g., multi-hue, diverging, and cyclical palettes) as secondary priorities. @jgough do you agree?

[ahopp]

@kgcreative you might be interested in taking a look as well since we need to better solve for theming in general across the experience and I think this would run in tandem (e.g., dark mode theming, dashboard palettes/theming, etc.).

[btzeng]

@ahopp @kgcreative
seems like we're looking for something like this- predefined visualization color config.

Also see reference here:
Color palette display