HN Explorer

The Most Powerful Colors in the World ...And How You Make The Next Ones (colourlovers.com)

172 points by dariusmonsef ↗ HN
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.

39 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread
wccrawford
The most powerful? Or the easiest to make good designs with?
[dead] dariusmonsef
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
That was an interesting article. I was completely unaware how many major brands use a similar color.
sahillavingia
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
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)

ugh
Blue is also a popular choice with Apple’s icon designers: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/dock.png
mccutchen
Not just with Apple's icon designers, but with icon designers targeting OS X as a whole:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mccutchen/4293401589/

(At least with the designers of the icons for the applications I use most often.)

jcl
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]
(comment deleted)
boredguy8
Does anyone know how culturally broad this is? The examples tend to be USian or highly western companies.
kreek
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

Gibbon
For web design, monitors tend to skew towards bluish white light, making blue designs look more appealing.
frossie
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
Yes it does. Orange is the complement to blue so orange will also look good on a blue screen.
pigbucket
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
+1 for Blaupunkt. I've always liked that word/brand.
eru
What's your first language?
MartinCron
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
Blue is also synonymous with trust and stability. Hence the predominance of blue in banking logos.
doron
"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.

cperciva
the whiter-than-white, bluey whiteness promised by Daz laundry detergent

Random trivia: In order to combat the fact that clothing gradually turns yellow as fibres are damaged, modern laundry detergents contain dyes which fluoresce blue under ultraviolet light. The "bluey whiteness" really is exactly that!

jrwoodruff
You can actually buy bluing agent for your laundry, it's pretty old school, but actually adds a bit of blue dye for the same effect.

http://www.mrsstewart.com/

cperciva
adds a bit of blue dye for the same effect

Blue dye != blue fluorescent dye. Blue dye simply absorbs non-blue light; blue fluorescent dye absorbs UV and emits blue light.

etal
And in the old days, to hide dirt and especially to mask the yellow sweat ring that develops around the collar after many days of hard labor, companies issued blue shirts to their workers as a uniform. Hence, "blue collar" work.
jonshea
In pottery there’s a saying that if you’ve made something and you’re not sure it’s good enough to sell, then you should just glaze it blue and someone will buy it regardless.
Gibbon
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
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
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
Classmates.com is rated higher than Tudou or Netflix.

I didn't realize they are still a force. Didn't facebook solve this problem?