While working on a branding project a few weeks ago, I happened to wonder what colors were most frequently used in brand identities.

I started poking around online, feeling sure someone had already done this research and neatly organized the results. However, I wasn't really satisfied with what I found. I saw a number of eye-catching but generally meaningless infographics that look great on Pinterest but don't really contain any practical information.

Since I couldn't find the quantitative information I'd been hoping for, I took matters into my own hands and started doing some research. (It's not not scientific-grade research, mind you, but at least good enough to help answer my original question.)

I started with BrandColors, which provides the color schemes of 456 different brands. From there, I was able to export a CSS file, which I then stripped down to 1,239 hexadecimal color codes, which I then converted to a decimal RGB format.

To visualize the brand colors, I customized the vis.js library to allow the colors to be displayed on a three-dimension graph. For the sake of simplicity, I used red, green, and blue axes to organize them (since all colors displayed on a screen are made up of a blend of those three colors). Here's what I came up with:

(Click and drag to explore.)





The line through the middle represents all the grays used in brand color schemes. Grays are a mostly-even balance of red, blue, and green, which is why you see them cutting right through the middle of the graph. If you explore a bit, you'll also see the line is somewhat flat. There are some cool grays (leaning toward blue) and warm grays (leaning toward yellow), but not much in the way of greenish or purplish grays.

There's a lot of diversity in the blue areas of the graph. Blue's a nice, inoffensive color that's a popular choice for brand identities, so it's no surprise that there are plenty of light blues, dark blues, purple-blues, green-blues, and so on.

The red/orange/yellow side of the graph is pretty strong as well. You'll notice the brand colors are more focused in that area than they are in the blue area, conveying a general preference for highly-saturated colors on the warm side of the spectrum. You'll see washed-out blues (leaning toward the gray line up the middle), but much fewer faded colors on the red side.

The green side of the graph is interesting, because it doesn't the ride the wall like the blues and the reds/oranges/yellows do. There seems to be a distinct preference for more balanced, naturalistic hues there. With green such a common color in nature, perhaps there's a bit of psychological discomfort associated with the more artificial greens when used in brand colors.

As you can see, the most interesting part of the graph isn't necessarily where the colors are, but where they're not. For whatever reason, certain colors just don't seem work well for branding, and you can clearly see that through the gaps and sparsely-populated areas of the graph.

Top 50 brand colors as Crayola crayons

Beyond visualizing the brand colors in three dimensions, I was also curious to try tallying them along basic color palettes, just to see which specific colors were most popular.

I did this by writing a script that cycled through various palettes, comparing them with each of the 1,239 brand colors to measure the distance between them, and then sorting them by smallest distance to largest to find the nearest color matches.

Just for fun, I decided to use the 163 standard Crayola crayon colors. Here are the top 50 matches, based on frequency:

Count Name 79 Outer Space 60 Midnight Blue 56 Maximum Red 48 Black 47 Mango Tango 43 Middle Yellow 40 Cerulean 32 Yellow-Orange 31 Eggplant 28 Red-Orange 26 White 24 Manatee 23 Geranium Lake 23 Charcoal Gray 22 Blue (I) 22 Maximum Green 22 Green 17 Inchworm 17 Denim 17 Green-Blue 17 Navy Blue 16 Razzmatazz 15 Asparagus 14 Maximum Blue 14 Dark Venetian Red 14 Orange-Red 14 Gray 13 Blue-Green 13 Cadet Blue 13 Burnt Orange 13 Tropical Rain Forest 12 Mountain Meadow 12 Pig Pink 11 Scarlet 11 Sunset Orange 11 Venetian Red 11 Fern 11 Cerulean Blue 10 Timberwolf 10 Red 9 Blue (II) 9 Blue-Violet 9 Shamrock 9 Pacific Blue 9 Middle Green Yellow 8 Robin's Egg Blue 7 Blue-Gray 7 Indigo 7 Turquoise Blue 7 Periwinkle

A particular brand color being common or not common doesn't necessarily mean that it's good or bad in itself. However, this can be useful information to keep in mind when developing color schemes for a new brand. While there's a certain advantage to having a distinctive color scheme, there may also be social, psychological, or cultural reasons why certain colors are seldom used.

There's no disputing that color selection is one of the more complicated areas of design, but hopefully this information helps you with working out the right solution for your situation. At the very least, it satisfied my curiosity, and sometimes that's enough!

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