Kibana Dark Theme Now Blue?

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

In Kibana versions up to 8.18.1, the dark theme was black, just as with almost all other software I have used that offers a dark theme. I just upgraded my company's DEV cluster, as well as my home cluster, to 9.0.1, and the very first thing I noticed is that "dark" is no longer black, but just a dark blue. Why was this changed?

EDIT: I can see the theme was deprecated and now just allows you to set it based on your system, but having done so, it is still just dark blue instead of black.

3 Likes
3

I believe many users valued the original black-based dark theme, and it would be great to understand if there are plans to offer more customization or a return to the previous style in the future. This change reminds me of when the summary statistics of important values, which used to appear at the top of timelines, were suddenly removed without warning. I remember showing them to a customer in a "How to investigate" Training and the next Day (after the Upgrade wich should bring improvements) they were gone. Features like these are highly valued by users, and their abrupt disappearance can be quite disruptive. Similarly, altering the dark theme from black to dark blue feels like another instance where a well-appreciated aspect was changed unexpectedly, and not necessarily for the better.

Thank you for considering this feedback.

1 Like
4

Good afternoon @MakoWish @Lexinga , thank you for your feedback, we are keeping track of this since we are very interested in how the new dark blue mode is being perceived.

I wanted to give a bit of background around this choice. We needed to offer a more consistent experience, from brand to product. The Elastic brand has been moving toward tones of blues in the past recent years and the need of a more cohesive appearance raised during this time.

As you can see in the following image (which compares a chart updated with the new Borealis theme and an illustration currently on our website, elastic.co) we can now safely say that they look like they belong to the same system.

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We know that this might be a little unexpected but we needed to have a better and wider approach to colors in order to offer a better experience and we hope this will be appreciated.

Said that, we are currently monitoring the reception of this update and we will keep your feedback in mind, we are not ruling out any possibility for the future (such as giving the users the possibility to pick their own favorite dark mode version, dark blue or dark grey)

Thank you again for reaching out, we really appreciate that
Giovanni

5

There’s only one solution, the elastic brand should move towards tones of blacks.