5 ms·

The Most Powerful Colors in the World ...And How You Make The Next Ones

172 points by dariusmonsef 16y ago

As a YC W10 startup, we were lucky to have dinner with Zuckerberg and I asked him afterwards why he chose that blue for Facebook... Cause he's color blind. Not a majestic response about how color influences mood, buying habits, etc. He used a color that was personally best for him. And a lot of the top brands in the world now, started in garages & workshops... where the branding research consisted of a couple rounds "what if we..." before a name was born and then a logo & design. My favorite example of this is Mercedes. The brand now stands for luxury cultivates a significant vibe... but why did the founder call it that? Simply, he named the company after his daughter... and now people name their daughters after the car! A lot of YC companies get greif for their names (most.ly the ly.ly ones) but how much does a name / brand have on the actual product being successful. I think it can have an influence, but at the end of the day... the quality of what you build will determine its success. With that in mind, my fellow hackers & founders... from a guy that runs a website about color... Be more adventurous with your colors. Have some fun.

wccrawford 16y ago
The most powerful? Or the easiest to make good designs with?
- dariusmonsef 16y ago
  Is it really easier to make a good design with Blue vs Green? I agree it is easier, but not from an execution perspective... but rather from an inspiration one. With so many blue sites, it's much easier to get "inspired" and model after others.
  - superkarn 16y ago
    Interestingly not every language distinguishes blue from green: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_...
dariusmonsef 16y ago
As a YC W10 startup, we were lucky to have dinner with Zuckerberg and I asked him afterwards why he chose that blue for Facebook... Cause he's color blind. Not a majestic response about how color influences mood, buying habits, etc. He used a color that was personally best for him. And a lot of the top brands in the world now, started in garages & workshops... where the branding research consisted of a couple rounds "what if we..." before a name was born and then a logo & design. My favorite example of this is Mercedes. The brand now stands for luxury cultivates a significant vibe... but why did the founder call it that? Simply, he named the company after his daughter... and now people name their daughters after the car! A lot of YC companies get greif for their names (most.ly the ly.ly ones) but how much does a name / brand have on the actual product being successful. I think it can have an influence, but at the end of the day... the quality of what you build will determine its success. With that in mind, my fellow hackers & founders... from a guy that runs a website about color... Be more adventurous with your colors. Have some fun.
MPiccinato 16y ago
That was an interesting article. I was completely unaware how many major brands use a similar color.
sahillavingia 16y ago
I think that this has a lot to do with the emotions felt when thinking of the color red (fire, exciting, passion) or blue (calm, simple, soothing). It's much harder to define a brand with green (leaves? slime?), as people have become used to the above two. From experience, it's also much easier to combine red and blue with a grayscale palette (iTunes icon, twitter to name two), which may also contribute to their popularity.
- dariusmonsef 16y ago
  Or red (anger, blood, propaganda) or blue (cold, sad, depressing) ...we all have different personal associations with color... And add on top of that cultural. As for green (money, health, fresh)
  - public_nme 16y ago
    I would add that red implies danger. Using the metaphor of an icon as a button, no one wants to push the red button. It might launch the nukes.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      funny use of colour: http://www.gursimran.com/showcase http://www.gursimran.com/showcase
ugh 16y ago
Blue is also a popular choice with Apple’s icon designers: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/dock.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/dock.png
- mccutchen 16y ago
  Not just with Apple's icon designers, but with icon designers targeting OS X as a whole: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mccutchen/4293401589/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mccutchen/4293401589/ (At least with the designers of the icons for the applications I use most often.)
  - jcl 16y ago
    And not just icons... the OS X interface generally marks interactive elements in blue (folders, buttons, scrollbars, highlights etc.) -- living up to the "Aqua" name. The default Windows 7 interface also has a bluish tint, although not nearly as extreme as it did with XP.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
boredguy8 16y ago
Does anyone know how culturally broad this is? The examples tend to be USian or highly western companies.
- kreek 16y ago
  Blue dominates as a color in the west as it represents 'corporate' and 'trust' to western eyes (if you ever want to got through customs faster at the airport wear a blue shirt). I'd imagine if you did the same ting for Asian companies the predominant color would be red. http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm
  - Gibbon 16y ago
    For web design, monitors tend to skew towards bluish white light, making blue designs look more appealing.
    - frossie 16y ago
      Doesn't explain the popularity on that list of orange. I have no fondness for orange (my HN topcolor is a soothing 7BB6F0) and have always been a bit of a loss to figure out why it figures so much. It also tends to be the same shade of orange - whereas at least with blue you get a bigger range.
      - Gibbon 16y ago
        Yes it does. Orange is the complement to blue so orange will also look good on a blue screen.
_corbett 16y ago
I incidentally find http://www.colourlovers.com http://www.colourlovers.com and specifically http://www.colourlovers.com/web/trends http://www.colourlovers.com/web/trends very useful in the design process
- hartror 16y ago
  Yeah colour lovers is my first stop on the inspiration trail when I start a new design. Browsing colour pallets gives me a starting point from which to build from without borrowing too heavily from others work directly.
pigbucket 16y ago
Blue really does get around. It's associated, in my troubled mind, with pornographic movies, melancholic music, police forces, and super-cleanness (the whiter-than-white, bluey whiteness promised by Daz laundry detergent), and the word "blue" seems especially popular among the names of colors for branding: Bluetooth, Blu-ray, Jetblue, Big Blue, Blue Cross, even Blaupunkt. Promiscuous Blue would be a great name for a band.
- MartinCron 16y ago
  +1 for Blaupunkt. I've always liked that word/brand.
  - eru 16y ago
    What's your first language?
    - MartinCron 16y ago
      English, but I had a vintage Mercedes Benz years ago with the Blaupunkt radio and the name makes me nostalgic for a more innocent time (when I thought I could fix up an old Mercedes).
- mthoms 16y ago
  Blue is also synonymous with trust and stability. Hence the predominance of blue in banking logos.
- doron 16y ago
  "Promiscuous Blue would be a great name for a band" International Klein Blue is probably the most promiscuous blue you can find, you cant reproduce that unnerving vibrancy on screens yet, pity.
  - dandelany 16y ago
    http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/yves_klein_blue.gif http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/yves_k... Wow. That is some blue blue. And that's not even it. http://training.sessions.edu/resources/interviews/interviews/michael_quinn.asp http://training.sessions.edu/resources/interviews/interviews... Apparently it's the same blue used by the Blue Man Group.
Gibbon 16y ago
What's interesting is how little thought seems to go into differentiating web sites through colour palette. It's a common consideration in other industries to establish a clear colour choice as a method of differentiation. Take Coke red, for example, versus Pepsi blue. Or green John Deere tractors or yellow Dewalt power tools. Any new entrant would be wise to pick a specific colour and stick to it. Looking at the colour maps here, were I to start a social network, I would go for a scheme in the yellow/orange/red spectrum to separate myself from the dogpile of sites lumped in the blue area. Likewise, for a blogging host, something in the greens or red/purples would be good. It looks like the location and social news sites are doing a better job of differentiating themselves. Also take a look at Google and Microsoft, clearly "rainbow" companies. Apple used to be a rainbow company but has done an excellent job of shifting their palette over to the monochromatics. Not only is it as far away from rainbow as you can get, but the monochromatics are associated with "expensive","premium" and "well designed". I think rainbow palettes actually kind of backfire when it comes to big companies. It's like they try too hard to say "hey look at us, we're so fun!" while also looking unfocused. However, overemphasis on one colour can backfire too.. just look at Yahoo and all their purple crap. They just seem completely dorky.
- tyng 16y ago
  Rainbow colour looks a bit cheap imo - for Google, because all its services are free for consumers, it plays fine. If I'm starting a social media company though, I probably wouldn't want to venture out too far away from blue - simply because it's the easiest way for users to associate it as a mainstream social media company, i.e. alongside the Facebook-Twitter-Linkedin-Foursquare league, unless you are competing head on with any of these big four. I know this is a cheap strategy, but it also makes it cheaper for you to establish yourself in the market. Or, just pick your favorite color, much easier and you'll always be comfortable with.
- petercooper 16y ago
  Looking at the colour maps here, were I to start a social network, I would go for a scheme in the yellow/orange/red spectrum to separate myself from the dogpile of sites lumped in the blue area. Is it good to be different merely to "separate yourself"? You could go with having white text on a black background to differentiate yourself too, but that wouldn't necessarily be a positive..
aneth 16y ago
Classmates.com is rated higher than Tudou or Netflix. I didn't realize they are still a force. Didn't facebook solve this problem?
andrewl 16y ago
NASA's Ames Research Center has a fascinating site called "Using Color in Information Display Graphics": http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ It has articles, tools, a bibliography, and an entire section called "Designing with Blue": http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/blue_2.php http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/blue_2.php

172 points by dariusmonsef 16y ago

wccrawford 16y ago

The most powerful? Or the easiest to make good designs with?

dariusmonsef 16y ago
Is it really easier to make a good design with Blue vs Green? I agree it is easier, but not from an execution perspective... but rather from an inspiration one. With so many blue sites, it's much easier to get "inspired" and model after others.
- superkarn 16y ago
  Interestingly not every language distinguishes blue from green: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_...

dariusmonsef 16y ago

MPiccinato 16y ago

That was an interesting article. I was completely unaware how many major brands use a similar color.

sahillavingia 16y ago

I think that this has a lot to do with the emotions felt when thinking of the color red (fire, exciting, passion) or blue (calm, simple, soothing). It's much harder to define a brand with green (leaves? slime?), as people have become used to the above two. From experience, it's also much easier to combine red and blue with a grayscale palette (iTunes icon, twitter to name two), which may also contribute to their popularity.

dariusmonsef 16y ago
Or red (anger, blood, propaganda) or blue (cold, sad, depressing) ...we all have different personal associations with color... And add on top of that cultural. As for green (money, health, fresh)
- public_nme 16y ago
  I would add that red implies danger. Using the metaphor of an icon as a button, no one wants to push the red button. It might launch the nukes.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    funny use of colour: http://www.gursimran.com/showcase http://www.gursimran.com/showcase

ugh 16y ago

Blue is also a popular choice with Apple’s icon designers: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/dock.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/dock.png

mccutchen 16y ago
Not just with Apple's icon designers, but with icon designers targeting OS X as a whole: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mccutchen/4293401589/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/mccutchen/4293401589/ (At least with the designers of the icons for the applications I use most often.)
- jcl 16y ago
  And not just icons... the OS X interface generally marks interactive elements in blue (folders, buttons, scrollbars, highlights etc.) -- living up to the "Aqua" name. The default Windows 7 interface also has a bluish tint, although not nearly as extreme as it did with XP.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

boredguy8 16y ago

Does anyone know how culturally broad this is? The examples tend to be USian or highly western companies.

kreek 16y ago
Blue dominates as a color in the west as it represents 'corporate' and 'trust' to western eyes (if you ever want to got through customs faster at the airport wear a blue shirt). I'd imagine if you did the same ting for Asian companies the predominant color would be red. http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm
- Gibbon 16y ago
  For web design, monitors tend to skew towards bluish white light, making blue designs look more appealing.
  - frossie 16y ago
    Doesn't explain the popularity on that list of orange. I have no fondness for orange (my HN topcolor is a soothing 7BB6F0) and have always been a bit of a loss to figure out why it figures so much. It also tends to be the same shade of orange - whereas at least with blue you get a bigger range.
    - Gibbon 16y ago
      Yes it does. Orange is the complement to blue so orange will also look good on a blue screen.

_corbett 16y ago

I incidentally find http://www.colourlovers.com http://www.colourlovers.com and specifically http://www.colourlovers.com/web/trends http://www.colourlovers.com/web/trends very useful in the design process

hartror 16y ago
Yeah colour lovers is my first stop on the inspiration trail when I start a new design. Browsing colour pallets gives me a starting point from which to build from without borrowing too heavily from others work directly.

pigbucket 16y ago

Blue really does get around. It's associated, in my troubled mind, with pornographic movies, melancholic music, police forces, and super-cleanness (the whiter-than-white, bluey whiteness promised by Daz laundry detergent), and the word "blue" seems especially popular among the names of colors for branding: Bluetooth, Blu-ray, Jetblue, Big Blue, Blue Cross, even Blaupunkt. Promiscuous Blue would be a great name for a band.

MartinCron 16y ago
+1 for Blaupunkt. I've always liked that word/brand.
- eru 16y ago
  What's your first language?
  - MartinCron 16y ago
    English, but I had a vintage Mercedes Benz years ago with the Blaupunkt radio and the name makes me nostalgic for a more innocent time (when I thought I could fix up an old Mercedes).
mthoms 16y ago
Blue is also synonymous with trust and stability. Hence the predominance of blue in banking logos.
doron 16y ago
"Promiscuous Blue would be a great name for a band" International Klein Blue is probably the most promiscuous blue you can find, you cant reproduce that unnerving vibrancy on screens yet, pity.
- dandelany 16y ago
  http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/yves_klein_blue.gif http://www.iainclaridge.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/yves_k... Wow. That is some blue blue. And that's not even it. http://training.sessions.edu/resources/interviews/interviews/michael_quinn.asp http://training.sessions.edu/resources/interviews/interviews... Apparently it's the same blue used by the Blue Man Group.

Gibbon 16y ago

What's interesting is how little thought seems to go into differentiating web sites through colour palette. It's a common consideration in other industries to establish a clear colour choice as a method of differentiation. Take Coke red, for example, versus Pepsi blue. Or green John Deere tractors or yellow Dewalt power tools. Any new entrant would be wise to pick a specific colour and stick to it. Looking at the colour maps here, were I to start a social network, I would go for a scheme in the yellow/orange/red spectrum to separate myself from the dogpile of sites lumped in the blue area. Likewise, for a blogging host, something in the greens or red/purples would be good. It looks like the location and social news sites are doing a better job of differentiating themselves. Also take a look at Google and Microsoft, clearly "rainbow" companies. Apple used to be a rainbow company but has done an excellent job of shifting their palette over to the monochromatics. Not only is it as far away from rainbow as you can get, but the monochromatics are associated with "expensive","premium" and "well designed". I think rainbow palettes actually kind of backfire when it comes to big companies. It's like they try too hard to say "hey look at us, we're so fun!" while also looking unfocused. However, overemphasis on one colour can backfire too.. just look at Yahoo and all their purple crap. They just seem completely dorky.

tyng 16y ago
Rainbow colour looks a bit cheap imo - for Google, because all its services are free for consumers, it plays fine. If I'm starting a social media company though, I probably wouldn't want to venture out too far away from blue - simply because it's the easiest way for users to associate it as a mainstream social media company, i.e. alongside the Facebook-Twitter-Linkedin-Foursquare league, unless you are competing head on with any of these big four. I know this is a cheap strategy, but it also makes it cheaper for you to establish yourself in the market. Or, just pick your favorite color, much easier and you'll always be comfortable with.
petercooper 16y ago
Looking at the colour maps here, were I to start a social network, I would go for a scheme in the yellow/orange/red spectrum to separate myself from the dogpile of sites lumped in the blue area. Is it good to be different merely to "separate yourself"? You could go with having white text on a black background to differentiate yourself too, but that wouldn't necessarily be a positive..

aneth 16y ago

Classmates.com is rated higher than Tudou or Netflix. I didn't realize they are still a force. Didn't facebook solve this problem?

andrewl 16y ago

NASA's Ames Research Center has a fascinating site called "Using Color in Information Display Graphics": http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/ It has articles, tools, a bibliography, and an entire section called "Designing with Blue": http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/blue_2.php http://colorusage.arc.nasa.gov/blue_2.php