Designers, please - anything but blue!
Someone was telling me the other day about their need to change their business brand (name and look, across all media, including brochures, websites, etc). This person vowed that their new design palette would have no blue in it, because everyone seems to have adopted blue as their primary colour. I didn’t take much notice at the time, but now I’ve begun seeing it too. Oh, there are differences in shade and hue, but blue is everywhere (this site included).
While we’re on the subject, many of the mastheads and layouts look similar. And whole swathes of sites have similar styles of cute icons. I know designers are creatures of fashion, and you don’t want designs so different that your visitors are overwhelmed by unfamiliarity, but this is getting ridiculous.
Isn’t the first rule of promotion to stand out from the crowd? Enough with the blue, already!
PS. Anyone know how to change the colour on this thing? My designer’s gone west.
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October 2nd, 2008 at 8:42 am
Ok, I’ll take the bait :-).
Designers don’t (neccessarily) choose blue, or any other colour, because it is fashionable. Designers choose a colour because it means something, and each and every variation has a different meaning.
Colours evoke emotional responses in people and, in the case of brand and identity development, are important in reinforcing and communicating the brand message.
Culture also has a huge impact on our perception of colour and the meanings associated with it.
October 2nd, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Here’s a good overview of colour meaning. A lot of blue because of the great feeling it gives us all. It’s also the most looked at colour in the supermarket isle, so be careful before you change, your website header currently looks, clean, crisp & inviting, that will change with a different colour…
http://www.sibagraphics.com/colour.php
October 2nd, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Thanks for the compliment, Roger. My PS was meant to be tongue in cheek. I like my site’s look and so do others, or so they tell me.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:22 am
I’d argue the first rule of (website) promotion is to be understood by the crowd. Using conventions helps this.
October 3rd, 2008 at 8:42 am
I don’t think my companion was complaining about content conventions (such as blue for links, or red for negative numbers), but more about the ubiquity of blue as the predominant colour in corporate media design, much as I have blue in my masthead.