Colours of the Web - Colour-dominance online

Design Community COLOURlovers recently produced an interesting piece on ’Colours of the Web’ - reviewing logo colour preferences for the 100 leading web properties - in accordance with Alexa.

You can see that the full spectrum is fairly well covered all in all, but there is a significant dominance of blue and red, which funnily enough are the most popular brand / logo colours both offline and online. For a brand expert, there are no real surprises here - either by pattern or distribution / frequency. In colour separation, the primary colours are Red, Green and Blue. We use Red and Blue to indicate extremes of ’Hot’ and ’Cool’ both literally and figuratively. Visually as well, red and blue are very dominant - the Sky and Sea are Blue, Sunsets and Blood are Red - there is so much symbolism that can be conveyed by colour - even the tone of colour - pastels don’t look as high quality as the rich-hued jewel colours. For logos and brands - you want them to stand out and be appealing. A trip to the supermarket soon confirms the dominance of a specific colour pallet  - but in the supermarket Red is dominant, as red is the most appetising colour, whilst blue is the opposite - blue is used for frozen and refrigerated goods, but for other articles you will see a lot of red and warm colours, as well as earthy tones.

I did an article in the Branding Digest section of our Magazine not so long ago - ’The Colour of Brand Identity’ which features how certain logos are so strongly associated with certain colours, that they effectively ’own’ them, at least within their space / market sector. For Comrz, we wanted to creat a fairly unique appeal to the brand, and settled on a very specific colour of ’Lime Green’ which is not much in use at all. It has to be said, that brand colours play a very significant symbolic /  interpretive role in how the brand communicates its values.

ANyway, I thought it might be interesting ro review the top 20:

(7 x Blue | 5 x Red | 3 x Multi | 2 x Orange | 2 X Grey | 1 x Purple)

1. Google - Multi - Represents breadth of offering
2. MSN / Windows / Bing - Multi - Represents breadth of offering
3. Yahoo - Purple - slightly rarer colour - the colour of Roman Senators, Emperors and Kings - denotes luxury and quality
4. Microsoft - Blue - ’Corporate’ Blue represents professionalism
5. Facebook - Blue - Possibly used to indicate that site is not just for play
6. YouTube - Red - Eye-catching, attention-grabbing Red
7. Wikipedia - Grey - Colourless here to indicate academia and neutrality
8. AOL - Blue - The Blue here represents quality
9. eBay - Multi - Represents breadth of offering
10. Apple - Grey - The colour of minimalism and modern design - reflects the aluminium and metallic bodies of many of its products
11. Amazon - Orange - Orange is a warm and welcoming colour - that’s why Affino Control Centre is orange
12. Blogger - Orange - Orange is a warm and welcoming colour
13. Ask - Red - Ask is the most immediately attractive colour - shouts for attention
14. Fox Interactive Media - Blue - Blue for quality
15. Mozilla - Red - A stand-out, attention-grabbing Red
16. Real Networks - Blue - Cool Blue
17. Adobe - Red - Bright, dominant Red
18. About - Red - Strong, authoritative Red
19. PayPal - Blue - Solid, reliably Blue is good for banking and financial services
20. WordPress - Blue - Professional Blue