Is blue the only color palette around?
Wednesday December 31, 2008
I took a look at some of the color palettes for the more popular social media sites this week, and it was interesting to me that they all had some version of blue in their palette. See for yourself: Facebook Palette, MySpace Palette, YouTube Color Palette, Flickr Color Palette, and even Craigslist Color Palette. Blue Web Color Palettes are a very popular choice on websites. They seem to indicate a sort of maturity, not screaming like red color palettes, but not too boring either. I just wonder if there is going to be a backlash at some point, and Web designers might break free of the blue mold to create palettes with yellows, greens, or even
Comments
I doubt there will be a change. If there is it won’t be much. Blue carries very important meaning in our world. It symbolizes, and conveys trust, success, strength, importance, stability, intelligence to name a few. In the world of business there will always be the color blue used some where. I don’t think there will be a backlash.
I find it interesting that all the sites you listed were social media sites. I think blue works for these folks because it makes users feel reassured that they’re putting their info out there on a stable, secure site. On the other side of the fence, Amazon’s still the same ol’ screaming yellow and Time.com is still using the same red, and neither one is hurting for traffic. It definitely depends (as always) on the site’s purpose and the audience’s expectations.
It’s an established default. Link colors default to blue in nearly every browser. If text on the web is blue and underlined, it’s a link. That’s one of the first things people new to the internet learn. Using blue (and purple for visited link states).
All these sites try their hardest to make their websites as usable as possible; using the established link colors is the natural way to go.