The 50 most popular brand colors

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!