Color is important in branding, whether the color is explicitly part of the domain name or not. If you use a logo or graphical background in domain presentation, it is important to consider the impact of different color choices.
This article looks at which colors are more popular, and the emotional associations of different color choices. Also, I look at how certain sectors prefer particular colors in their logos.
Last week we looked at domain names and color. That analysis indicated that green, blue and red tended to dominate domain name sales, business names, and brandable marketplace domain listings. This article includes similar data for additional colors suggested by readers, including brown, gold and silver.
What Colors Do People Prefer?
Perhaps a good place to start is to ask what colors people prefer. While there are gender, age and cultural differences, overall blue is selected most often.
A researcher at University of Maryland asked 2000 people their favourite color. For men, the favorite colors were blue (42%), green (25%), purple (12%) and red (8%). Women prefer blue as well (29%), but purple was a close second (27%), followed by green (19%), red (9%) and pink (7%). That data was obtained in the United States and dominated by responses from young adults, so may not hold overall.
Almost certainly there are cultural differences. Steven Smith published a publicly-available thesis One Brand, Two Brands, Red Brands, Blue Brands: A Crosscultural Analysis that looked at how the colors red and blue are viewed differentially in China and the United States.
Color and Emotion
There are numerous articles on the emotions associated with different colors. Cameron Chapman’s Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color is an excellent place to start your reading on the topic.
Most of these divide colors into warm colors, such are red, orange, yellow and perhaps brown, and cool colors, such as green, blue and their combinations.
The first step in designing your domain logo or color presentation scheme should be to ask how you want the name to be perceived – loud or subtle, creative or stable, energetic or calming, etc.
Psychology and Color
Nicole Martins Ferreira has published an illuminating article on Color Psychology: How Color Meanings Affect Your Brand. As she writes:
Let’s look at what she has to say about some of the colors that topped our charts in the first article.
Orange has some similarities with red, but also differences.
While yellow can mean caution or deceit, more often
We found that green is a very popular color, both in domain sales and in business names. As Nicole Ferreira writes,
Blue is the first choice for many people.
Purple was a surprisingly popular color choice for both women and men.
She also comments on the neutral colors.
Similarly, grey represents neutrality and balance. When using this color in domain names one consideration is that the spelling gray is most common in the USA and some other parts of the world, while many other countries favor the UK spelling grey.
Colors and Famous Brand Logos
It is instructive to look at famous brand logos divided by color.
The Pinterest page for red brand logos shows a representative collection. While there are exceptions, many of the brands that use red are food and drink related, or news and media. There are examples from other sectors, however, such as Avis, Netflix, and Canon.
Fewer famous brands use orange, with The Home Depot one of the more famous. See orange logo examples here.
If you compare famous brand logos that are blue to the earlier list for red, you will see that many technology brands choose blue.
John Deere, Holiday Inn, Starbucks, Whole Foods are among famous brands that use green.
If interested in brands for colors not mentioned, just do a Google image search for
Using Unusual Combinations
Some brands deliberately use a color—object combination that is rare, or nonexistent, in real life. The unexpected combination helps the user picture a unique and memorable icon and name.
For example, blue is not a color we associate with bees, but the company Illumina use, in redirection, BlueBee.com for cloud-based computing solutions under that brand name. Interestingly, though, they don’t use blue in their splash screen.
Not many tractors are pink, but Pink Tractor forms a memorable mental picture. When you go to PinkTractor.com you will see that the name is a perfect fit for their organization, so perhaps not really a contrast.
BlueTooth is another brand that uses an unusual combination.
Synergy in Color Names
It is more common, however, to use synergy, that is color–object combinations that are found in everyday life. Barns are often red, and the name Red Barn is, according to OpenCorporates used by more than 1600 active businesses and organizations.
Object Names That Include A Color
Even stronger synergy exists when an object name commonly uses a color, such as red wine. Names like this have often sold for strong prices. Here are a few examples with NameBio-listed prices:
Other Colors
As promised last week, I took a look at additional colors suggested by readers. The table below shows the colors considered, the number of times that color appeared as a prefix or a suffix in a NameBio-listed domain sale, or as a sale of the exact color in some extension. I only included sales of $500 or more to concentrate on retail sales.
After the numbers of sales, I provide the total dollar volume for each color, and the average prices. I included both the spelling gray and grey separately.
Below is a graphical display of the dollar volume when the color is in prefix and suffix positions for the top four additional colors considered.
As shown below, these additional colors are all registered in many extensions.
I searched BrandBucket listings to see how many times each of these colors was contained within a name. There were so many other words ending in tan that I did not include it.
I used OpenCorporates to look at how frequently each of these additional colours appeared in active business or organization name listings. Note however, that in many cases these don’t refer to the color. For example, gold and silver listings can be mining or jewellery companies, cream appears in the names of ice-cream stores and factories, and brown is a common surname in parts of the world.
Need inspiration when searching for less common colors for domain registration? Here is a good color list.
Thanks to readers who suggested the additional colors. Also, thanks to NameBio, BrandBucket, dotDB and OpenCorporates that I used in this analysis.
This article looks at which colors are more popular, and the emotional associations of different color choices. Also, I look at how certain sectors prefer particular colors in their logos.
Last week we looked at domain names and color. That analysis indicated that green, blue and red tended to dominate domain name sales, business names, and brandable marketplace domain listings. This article includes similar data for additional colors suggested by readers, including brown, gold and silver.
What Colors Do People Prefer?
Perhaps a good place to start is to ask what colors people prefer. While there are gender, age and cultural differences, overall blue is selected most often.
A researcher at University of Maryland asked 2000 people their favourite color. For men, the favorite colors were blue (42%), green (25%), purple (12%) and red (8%). Women prefer blue as well (29%), but purple was a close second (27%), followed by green (19%), red (9%) and pink (7%). That data was obtained in the United States and dominated by responses from young adults, so may not hold overall.
Almost certainly there are cultural differences. Steven Smith published a publicly-available thesis One Brand, Two Brands, Red Brands, Blue Brands: A Crosscultural Analysis that looked at how the colors red and blue are viewed differentially in China and the United States.
Color and Emotion
There are numerous articles on the emotions associated with different colors. Cameron Chapman’s Color Theory for Designers, Part 1: The Meaning of Color is an excellent place to start your reading on the topic.
Most of these divide colors into warm colors, such are red, orange, yellow and perhaps brown, and cool colors, such as green, blue and their combinations.
The first step in designing your domain logo or color presentation scheme should be to ask how you want the name to be perceived – loud or subtle, creative or stable, energetic or calming, etc.
Psychology and Color
Nicole Martins Ferreira has published an illuminating article on Color Psychology: How Color Meanings Affect Your Brand. As she writes:
All of the quotations in this section are from her article cited above.
Let’s look at what she has to say about some of the colors that topped our charts in the first article.
She goes on to point out that red is he most intense color.
Orange has some similarities with red, but also differences.
While yellow can mean caution or deceit, more often
We found that green is a very popular color, both in domain sales and in business names. As Nicole Ferreira writes,
Blue is the first choice for many people.
She does go on to say blue can also be associated with sadness or depression, as in feeling blue.
Purple was a surprisingly popular color choice for both women and men.
She also comments on the neutral colors.
Similarly, grey represents neutrality and balance. When using this color in domain names one consideration is that the spelling gray is most common in the USA and some other parts of the world, while many other countries favor the UK spelling grey.
Colors and Famous Brand Logos
It is instructive to look at famous brand logos divided by color.
The Pinterest page for red brand logos shows a representative collection. While there are exceptions, many of the brands that use red are food and drink related, or news and media. There are examples from other sectors, however, such as Avis, Netflix, and Canon.
Fewer famous brands use orange, with The Home Depot one of the more famous. See orange logo examples here.
If you compare famous brand logos that are blue to the earlier list for red, you will see that many technology brands choose blue.
John Deere, Holiday Inn, Starbucks, Whole Foods are among famous brands that use green.
If interested in brands for colors not mentioned, just do a Google image search for
Brand Logos COLOR with COLOR replaced with the color you want to research. Many excellent compilations are easily found.Using Unusual Combinations
Some brands deliberately use a color—object combination that is rare, or nonexistent, in real life. The unexpected combination helps the user picture a unique and memorable icon and name.
For example, blue is not a color we associate with bees, but the company Illumina use, in redirection, BlueBee.com for cloud-based computing solutions under that brand name. Interestingly, though, they don’t use blue in their splash screen.
Not many tractors are pink, but Pink Tractor forms a memorable mental picture. When you go to PinkTractor.com you will see that the name is a perfect fit for their organization, so perhaps not really a contrast.
BlueTooth is another brand that uses an unusual combination.
Synergy in Color Names
It is more common, however, to use synergy, that is color–object combinations that are found in everyday life. Barns are often red, and the name Red Barn is, according to OpenCorporates used by more than 1600 active businesses and organizations.
Object Names That Include A Color
Even stronger synergy exists when an object name commonly uses a color, such as red wine. Names like this have often sold for strong prices. Here are a few examples with NameBio-listed prices:
- greenhouse.com $500,000
- blackjack.com $460,000
- BlueJeans.com $150,000
- RedWine.com $150,000
- BlackList.com $85,000
- WhiteWine.com $19,000
Other Colors
As promised last week, I took a look at additional colors suggested by readers. The table below shows the colors considered, the number of times that color appeared as a prefix or a suffix in a NameBio-listed domain sale, or as a sale of the exact color in some extension. I only included sales of $500 or more to concentrate on retail sales.
After the numbers of sales, I provide the total dollar volume for each color, and the average prices. I included both the spelling gray and grey separately.
Below is a graphical display of the dollar volume when the color is in prefix and suffix positions for the top four additional colors considered.
As shown below, these additional colors are all registered in many extensions.
I searched BrandBucket listings to see how many times each of these colors was contained within a name. There were so many other words ending in tan that I did not include it.
I used OpenCorporates to look at how frequently each of these additional colours appeared in active business or organization name listings. Note however, that in many cases these don’t refer to the color. For example, gold and silver listings can be mining or jewellery companies, cream appears in the names of ice-cream stores and factories, and brown is a common surname in parts of the world.
Need inspiration when searching for less common colors for domain registration? Here is a good color list.
Thanks to readers who suggested the additional colors. Also, thanks to NameBio, BrandBucket, dotDB and OpenCorporates that I used in this analysis.
