In the company of colors: brand-color associations | Hacker News Reader

In the company of colors: brand-color associations

filosophy.org

40 points______13 comments

Guessing the brands here is quite difficult, because the color samples have come from many different sectors. I don't think many people would be able to differentiate between the blues for LinkedIn and AT&T, or the magentas for Flickr and T-Mobile. However, if you showed me a blue sample and pink sample and told me they only represented social media sites - or mobile telecoms companies - then I sure as hell could tell you which one each is.

As a guessing game, I really liked "Unevolved Brands", where logos were reduced to circles and solid colors:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/grahamsblog/sets/72157625155090...

http://unevolvedbrands.tumblr.com/

It would also be interesting to have these clustered by unlabeled industry and try to guess the industry.

I'd love to see this sorted by hue rather than in random order. Who knew IBM and Intel’s blues were that close?

I was surprised at the range of blues (IBM, Intel, Facebook, GE), but I was also surprised how a few of the reds look identical to me (Lego, Coca-cola, CVS).

Google: all of the above.

Employees must hate that. How do you get company swag that doesn't look like a harlequin outfit?

Most stuff is in one of the four primary colors in the logo.

When I was making this a few of the companies that I thought to include, like Ebay, Google, and even the infamous Color itself didn't really fit the mold, because they didn't have dominant colors.

There are also some that don't really have color at all. Microsoft seems to just be black on white, even though the Windows brand itself was red, yellow, green and blue.

I always associated Microsoft with a medium-dark blue, perhaps because of the favicon?

http://www.microsoft.com/favicon.ico

Google swag usually isn't primarily in Google colors. I have a jacket which is black with a small red "Geo NYC" logo on the breast...and a t-shirt which is black with the Google logo on it in the normal colors. Neither looks clownish.

Also check out http://kashiwasato.com/ web site of one of Japan's top designers.. Very conscious use of simple color palettes for striking branding. (Warning: site is heavy on flash and noisy..)

Interesting to see that UPS stand out from the crowd. They chose that color because it looks professional and dignified, but I'm sure there is some benefit from not looking like the rest of the blue corporations.

Brown doesn't show as much dirt.

Hm. Looks like I need to calibrate my display. I can't even tell the difference between a few of them.

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