Colors change via reloads of of the saved dashboard:
And the next reload:
The only change is the timeframe.
If you are reloading the entire page, then the colors may be reassigned. However, if you are simply changing the time range, the colors should stay the same.
There are also two workarounds you can use for this behavior (depending on your Kibana version):
If you want a key always associated with a certain color, you can modify the Settings/Advanced config value, "visualization:colorMapping" to something like {"US": "red"}.
Otherwise, in the latest version of Kibana, you can click on the value in the legend and customize the color which shows up for the given visualization.
Thanks Lukas...this is 4.3.1 which appears to be the latest from the downloads page. I did see when I tested out the 5.0.0 snapshot that you could customize colors...and as I understand it this regression is fixed in 4.4, so I'll expect it to be fixed when 4.4 is released for download. Thanks again.