What colors do the most popular sites use?



    Color is an important factor when choosing a product. This can be confirmed by most buyers of various products - from cars to shoes.

    Color significantly affects the performance of sales on the Internet and site traffic in general. Almost half of the users form an opinion about a website based on its design. The color scheme plays far from the last role here.

    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 starters, Paul looked at Alexa rankings.and arbitrarily 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 obtained sample and visually displayed the scatter of values ​​on the graphs.

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


    The image of Paul Hebert's website

    The dominance of blue on the global network is so obvious that the designer had to separate the turquoise color into a separate category.


    Image of Paul Hebert's site

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

    “Magic” colors


    Color, according to research by neurobiologists and psychologists, has the ability to influence certain segments of the audience.

    Blue color symbolizes safety.


    The “safest” color scheme is blue. Any shade of it "works" and each combination with blue is effective. Blue is a favorite for most people, regardless of gender, age and other parameters.

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

    Many sites use the color "security." For examples, you do not need to go far.





    And, of course, the VKontakte social network:



    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





    Every user knows that the site design 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, are three times less on Baidu, Google and Wikipedia.

    Nevertheless, Amazon developers try to use the blue color as little as possible, preferring warmer shades to it, and on the Yahoo site, Hebert, in general, was unable to determine the dominant color.



    The designer intends to re-analyze the palette of leading web resources, including 100 or even 1,000 sites in the sample. Hebert expressed his conviction that the results of a larger experiment will help him find answers to several fundamental questions that have long been of concern to him.

    For example, he would like to know whether the color preferences of an individual are an innate feature or whether they are able to change depending on time and culture.

    You can familiarize yourself with the color analysis of each site on this page .

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