COLOURlovers recently compared the predominate colors chosen for brand identification out of the top 100 most popular websites. Blue and red with their various shades and hues top the list. Sometimes the color is chosen after many hours of market research, and other times the arbitrary can turn out to be poignant. I didn’t know before reading this article that Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, chose the now iconic blue shade because he is color blind and blue is one of the few colors he can see.

Since your brand extends beyond the web to all identification and marketing material, when creating a new company or rebranding your current one, think about how your brand colors will represent across all media. Maybe the web popular blue will not work as well for you in print.


The Most Powerful Colors in the World – Darius A Monsef for COLOURlovers

When we released our report on the colors of the social web, based on data analyzed by our Twitter theme tool, we were surprised that blue was such a dominant color in people’s profile designs. Was Twitter’s default color influencing their design decisions? Or is blue really THE most popular and dominant color online? …We decided to look at the colors in the brands from the top 100 sites in the world to see if we could paint a more colorful picture.

Turns out the blue-berry doesn’t fall far from the bush. The web landscape is dominated by a large number of blue brands… but Red occupies a large amount of space as well. What’s driving this? You might want to say that carefully organized branding research and market tests were done to choose the perfect colors to make you spend your money, but a lot of the brands that have grown to be global web powerhouses, started as small web startups… and while large corporate giants with branding departments spend quite a lot on market research, user testing, branding, etc. Lots of the sites listed above got started with brands created by the founders themselves with little to no research into the impact their color choice would have. I once asked Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook why he chose blue for his site design… “I’m color blind, it’s the only color I can see.” …and now 500 Million people around the world stare at a mostly blue website for hours each week.