The 50 Most Popular Brand Colors

by | Oct 12, 2016 | Branding, Design

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.

I was 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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