Colour palettes and scales

kepler's colour controls are unchanged in the panel. This page covers the two questions that come up specifically in a Grafana dashboard.

The controls, briefly

Every layer has a flat colour, or a Color Based On a column plus a palette and a scale. The scale decides how values map to palette steps:

• Quantile — equal counts per step. Every colour is equally common; outliers do not dominate.
• Quantize — equal ranges per step. Colours are comparable between two maps of the same measure; a skewed distribution will look almost uniform.
• Jenks Natural Breaks — steps placed where the data itself has gaps, recomputed when the number of colours changes. A good first look at clustered data; not offered on vector tilesets, which never hold the whole distribution.

The choice matters more than the palette. A quantile scale on earthquake magnitude will make a magnitude-3 tremor look significant because a fifth of the data has to be in the top bucket; a quantize scale on the same data leaves the top bucket almost empty, which is the honest picture.

Colour does not follow the Grafana theme

Follow dashboard theme restyles kepler's UI chrome and picks the base map — it does not touch your layer colours. A layer coloured with a red-to-blue palette looks the same in light and dark mode.

That is the right default: layer colour is data encoding, not decoration, and having it shift with a viewer's theme preference would make two people reading the same dashboard see different maps.

The consequence is that a palette should be chosen to work on both base maps if the dashboard follows the theme, or the base map should be pinned to a specific one. A pale palette that reads beautifully on Positron can disappear entirely on Dark Matter.

Grafana's own colour settings do nothing here

Standard panel options — field colour scheme, thresholds, value mappings — are not used by this panel. The map's colours come from kepler's layer configuration and nowhere else.

If you need a threshold-based colour, express it in the query and colour by the resulting column:

SELECT lat AS latitude, lon AS longitude,
       CASE WHEN pm25 > 55 THEN 'unhealthy'
            WHEN pm25 > 35 THEN 'moderate'
            ELSE 'good' END AS band
FROM readings;

Then Color Based On → band with a categorical palette. This has the advantage of being visible in the query rather than buried in a saved configuration blob.

Custom palettes

kepler lets you build one and it is captured by Save current map like everything else. Worth knowing if your organisation has brand colours: define it once, save the configuration, and copy that panel as the starting point for new maps.

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Upstream: Color palettes · Layer attributes

Written against kepler.gl 3.3.0-alpha.20. See Upstream documentation.