COLOURlovers, an online community of folks who love all things color and creative, has put together a comprehensive color study of the top 100 websites. Not satisfied to simply rank these sites in numerical order, the team there created — and kindly shared — an infographic that tells an interesting story.
The bottom line: If you’re aiming for the top, you’d best be blue.
Take a look for yourself. It’s a great piece of info at a glance.
For those thinking that the Web’s big brands have broken out of the tight bounds of corporate identity, you may be surprised to find that just as traditional brands gravitate to the indigo end of the spectrum, so too do their Web-based brethren. What is striking is the crowd of social media sites — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace — clustered in blue.
David Zax, blogging for Fast Company, suggests that the “phenomenon called ‘economies of agglomeration’” could be at work here, and in creating a “’blue district,’ (the color blue) becomes the only respectable place for a social media company to set up shop; a brilliant but fuchsia-branded networking site may flounder. He also cites a Wired study, conducted in 2003, that noted the import of location and proximity in the color spectrum and similar groupings as the ones found and illustrated by COLOURlovers.
As the boundaries blur between a brand’s owned (and controlled) website and its social media space (who needs a microsite anymore, really), it will be interesting to see how identity and brand are maintained. If this social-equals-blue equation bears out, what’s to become of the established brand that’s orange inside and out? What of the new brand just starting out, looking to stake out new territory and shake up its category?
It would appear — with this infographic and the reality it reveals — that online brands, and those spending more and more time there, will follow a tried-and-true, paint-by-numbers approach to color.