What colors use the most popular sites?

Color is an important factor when choosing a product. This can confirm the majority of buyers of various goods - from cars to shoes.

Color significantly affects the performance of sales on the Internet and site traffic in general. Nearly half of users form an opinion about a website based on its design. The color scheme plays a significant role here.
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Designer Paul Hebert analyzed 10 popular sites. He collected statistics on the distribution of colors used on the main page of the site and in the style sheet.

“I often have problems creating color schemes, and I was curious how other companies act in this case,” he reasoned .

For a start, Paul studied the Alexa rating and randomly chose 10 of the most visited sites - Google.com, Youtube.com, Facebook.com, Baidu.com, Yahoo.com, Wikipedia.org, Amazon.com, Google.co.in, Qq.com and Twitter.com.

The designer developed a script that returns the values ​​of all colors used on each site in CSV format. The result was a set of 10 entries of this format:

http://www.Google.com|#fff|#000|#767676|#2d2d2d|#bebebe|rgba(0,0,0,.2)|#ccc|#c0c0c0|#36c|#4c4c4c|#dd4b39|#dd8e27|#900|#eee|black|#f5f5f5|rgba(0,0,0,.12)|#666|#fef9db|#4d90fe|rgba(255,255,255,0.5)|rgba(0,0,0,.1)|#3079ed|#dcdcdc|#444|#4787ed|#2f5bb7|#357ae8|rgba(0,0,0,0.3)|#f1f1f1|#f8f8f8|#fbfbfb|#ffffff|#c6c6c6|#222|rgba(0,0,0,.8)|rgba(0,0,0,0)|#ebebeb|rgba(0,0,0,.3)|#00c|#11c|#551a8b|#999 

He posted the source code for this script on Github. A project with this and other scripts is available here .

After that, Hebert analyzed the sample and visually displayed the spread of values ​​on the graphs.

It turned out that the design of the sites was used twice as many shades of blue than yellow or red, and three times more than green. To simplify the calculations, Hebert did not take into account the transparent color.


Image of Paul Hebert's Site

The dominance of blue in the global network is so obvious that the designer had to allocate turquoise in a separate category.


Image of Paul Hebert's Site

The distance from the center of the circle to the point showing a particular color indicates the degree of saturation. The fatter the color point, the more often it appears on the ten most popular sites.

"Magic" of color

Color, according to neuroscientists and psychologists, has the ability to influence certain segments of the audience.

Blue color symbolizes safety

The most "safe" color range is blue. Any shade of it “works” and every combination with blue effectively. Blue - a favorite with most people, regardless of gender, age and other parameters.

Some psychologists believe that the blue of the clear sky ("safe" weather) or the ocean (which reflects the cloudless sky) is associated in people with reliability, confidence and power.

Many sites use the color of "security." There is no need to go far for examples.





And, of course, the social network VKontakte:

Green color symbolizes growth

The main message of green is growth. For most researchers, the reasons for this association are obvious: most plants are green.

Other findings

Each user knows that the design of the site of the popular social platform Facebook is a lot of blue. However, along with it, the site widely uses a range of other colors, which, for example, on Baidu, Google and Wikipedia sites are three times smaller.

Nevertheless, Amazon developers try to use as little blue as possible in the design of the site, preferring warmer colors to it, and on the Yahoo site Hebert, in general, failed to determine the dominant color.



The designer intends to re-analyze the leading web resource palette, including 100 or even 1,000 sites in the sample. Hebert expressed the conviction that the results of a larger experiment would help him find answers to several fundamental questions that had long since excited him.

For example, he would like to know whether the color preferences of an individual are a congenital feature or whether they can vary with time and culture.

You can view the analysis of the color of each site on this page .