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Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte, Ozon, Intel – these companies use blue in their design. Trends decided to find out what caused this and how the attitude towards blue has changed in history.
It is believed that classic blue is a conservative color, it calms and inspires confidence, symbolizes responsibility and intelligence. A person has associations with nature – the sky, water, and also coolness – which means that he relaxes. This color is equally considered favorite by both men and women.
However, if we turn to the history of this color, it turns out that it became popular only recently, and a few centuries ago it was considered expensive and rare.
The role of blue in culture
The admiration for the blue color began in antiquity. The ancient Egyptians were inspired by the rare blue lotus. They used a blue synthetic pigment of lapis lazuli or malachite mixed with sand and sodium compounds. They decorated clothes and premises, painted frescoes and tombs of the pharaohs.
In Europe, the Celts used the wild blueberry plant to produce blue dye. Another dye, indigo, came to Europe from India in the days of Ancient Greece, but for a long time remained a scarce luxury item.
Representatives of art were the first to become interested in blue. They began to associate this color with the sky, divine light, and even sapphires. To get blue paint, European Renaissance artists ground lapis lazuli, which was also brought from the East. As a result, this color was more expensive than the rest, so its use was limited to really important and expensive things. Usually the clothes of the Virgin Mary were dyed blue. Gradually, blue was added to landscapes, where it helped to create a sense of three-dimensional space.
Blue began to be actively used in church stained-glass windows, and then as an emblem color. And he became royal thanks to the French rulers, who used azure as the background color of their coat of arms. Later, the color was popularized by Protestants, who considered it discreet and noble.
In the era of Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer, there was an opinion that drawing was more important than color. But by the XNUMXth century, the idea of color had won. Artists turned to different colors to convey the liveliness of objects. Blue, red and yellow came to the fore. In Germany, the first artificial paint appeared – Prussian blue. The color she gave became a favorite for the era of romanticism. In The Doctrine of Color, the poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe described blue as cold, associated with the sky and mountain peaks.
In the 17th century, a new association with blue was fixed – with space. A picture of the illuminated Earth, taken from the Apollo 1972 spacecraft in XNUMX, was called “Blue Marble”.
blue color in nature
People’s color preferences are influenced by environmental factors. So, the color of a clear sky and water bodies is perceived by the subconscious as a sign of a favorable environment.
In the plant and animal world, the blue color is not so common. The scientists used an online plant database to estimate the relative frequency of blue flowers compared to others. It turned out that only those plants that are pollinated by bees and other insects have a blue pigment. If the area is inaccessible, then there are more such flowers. One example is mountain violets, which grow at altitude where there are almost no pollinators. Accordingly, plants need to “attract” rare insects with an intense blue pigment.
The secret lies in how the vision of all insects is arranged. They have photoreceptors that are sensitive to ultraviolet, blue and green light.
Which companies and websites have turned to blue
Blue is used by many IT companies as a corporate color. Examples include Intel, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Dell. It is also used by financial institutions – American Express, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Paypal, large corporations – Procter & Gamble, General Electric, General Motors, Boeing and Lowe’s.
Most often, social networks and mobile applications resort to blue, for example, geographic information services like Foursquare or Rumap. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte, Mashable, Telegram, Livejournal, Tumblr, Dropbox – they all use different shades of this color in their design.
At the same time, the dominance of blue is still, to a certain extent, a cognitive distortion. “While blue seems to be the predominant color in the digital space, in fact, on the Internet, we are mostly surrounded by achromatic colors: white, black, gray. And everything else stands out against their background. Otherwise, it would be much more difficult for us to perceive information from the screen,” Daniil Ulanovsky, art director of PostNauka, told Trends.
His words are confirmed by foreign studies. Designer Paul Hebert decided to analyze which colors and their shades are preferred by the most popular sites and services. He chose Google.com, Youtube.com, Facebook.com, Baidu.com, Yahoo.com, Wikipedia.org, Amazon.com, Google.co.in, Qq.com and Twitter.com for analysis. It turned out that when designing them, shades of blue were used twice as much as yellow or red, and three times more than green, but less than gray.
Secrets of the Blue Internet
Early web browsers, such as Mosaic for Windows, already highlighted hyperlinks in blue. It is believed that since the first sites had a gray background and black text, designers needed to come up with a bright alternative. True, the creator of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee, later stated that the choice of blue was completely accidental: the first Internet client simply used underlining to highlight a hyperlink, and highlighting underlined text in blue was the default.
Among red, green, and blue, it is now believed that interface designers choose the latter for one reason – because of the ability of all people to see this color. Most color blind people cannot distinguish between red and green colors, since the same receptors in the eye are responsible for their recognition. According to various sources, from 7% to 10% of men and 0,4% of women suffer from such color blindness.
One of the first companies to actively use blue was Microsoft in the 1990s. With errors in Windows 95, which occurred quite often, users were shown a “blue screen of death”. The blue appeared when executing the Ctrl+Alt+Delete command, which called the task manager to shut down Windows. In June 2021, Microsoft presented the new Windows 11 operating system. Blue became its main design color. Prior to this, the color was already present in Windows XP, 8 and 10, but in combination with others. Now the design of the OS has become almost monochrome.
Facebook has become, perhaps, the most popular site that has used blue in the design. The founder of the social network, Mark Zuckerberg, then explained the choice with his own color blindness. It is possible that younger projects decided to follow the example of a successful company. At a minimum, the founder of Vkontakte, Pavel Durov, acknowledged this fact.
By the way, Facebook itself, when updating the design in 2020, slightly “diluted” the blue color with white. This was necessary in order to visually emphasize some interface elements and draw the attention of users to new features, as well as for compatibility with the dark theme.
According to Ulanovsky, there is no single reason why the blue color has become widespread in the Internet environment: “I can assume that this is a series of coincidences and decisions of individuals. But it still has prerequisites. One of the most important reasons I think is how the digital environment is related to the perception of a person in a cultural context, especially in the early stages of the emergence of the Internet. Digital is technology, it is something useful, but cold, calm and unexplored, sterile and not very alive. This, of course, is not cold dark space, but it is no longer “warm, tube” computers. In general, colors that are cold in every sense most accurately convey the feeling of digital.”
Blue problems
Philip Stanley-Marbell, a professor at the University of Cambridge who studies color perception and display performance, says there are downsides to blue. In OLED displays, color-generating pixels differ in their rate of aging, he says. Moreover, the older they get, the more current is required to obtain the same brightness, and this provokes even more aging. In turn, pixel efficiency has a critical impact on battery life.
As Stanley-Marbell notes, at maximum brightness, it is the blue subpixels that typically require more current and age faster than red or green ones.