MENU CLOSE
His Majesty, 000080

NUMB & NUMBER.

Above:  The web’s most clicked color.

000080 may sound a bit like the unlucky name of a secret agent, out of a Ian Fleming’s unlucky novel.  Truth is: 000080 is a lucky number, being the most clicked color on the worldwide web. It’s  more popular than Yellow Submarine, Simply Red and the All Blacks, combined. Ant that’s because you are more likely to click a link with this color than any other in the palette. We all know we are governed by numbers and Statistics is the measure of all things. Out faith in numbers is so strong that we generate an even stronger, self-replicating trend. This explains why more and more people choose 000080 as The Color of Choice. Not because it’s beautiful or fits the aesthetic needs of our message, but only beacuse Google Stats tell us it works better. This behavior, obviously, transforms an initial evidence into an Absolute Truth. It’s like a snowball: once it starts to roll downhill, you can’t stop it. And grows bigger. But Statistics starts as a set of consistent assumptions aiming to provide just an ‘idealized’ description of a questionable mechanism. It’s not precise, not to mention infallible.

Stats, for instance, forget to add that the more people are going to choose this color, the more omologated this will become. The brandpowder’s graph clearly shows how the blue line, representing the statistical model of mass behavior, leads to its rapid growth as much as its inevitable decline. The red line, by contrast, expresses a more individual adoption, based on personal taste rather than omologated response. You can see a twisty but steadily growing force in it.

Statistics, according to the elegant intuition of Eric Leo Lehmann, is based – itself – on statistic information. It’s not as accurate as we tend to think. Creativity should abandon this flimsy side of maths and go back to a more risky, uncharted, but much more exciting approach to work. Art is unpredictable and fun. Numbers, if not properly read and understood, can be just numb.

Note: the term Statistics, in this article, is used as singular when defining the science, as plural when referring to numbers.

8 Comments

Join the discussion and tell us your opinion.

Don Pezzanoreply
July 18, 2012 at 6:48 PM

God I hate trends. Black all the way baby.

carloreply
July 18, 2012 at 8:35 PM
– In reply to: Don Pezzano

Thank you, Don.

we agree: trends are not trendy.

The Brandpowder Team

laranasserreply
July 25, 2012 at 9:38 AM

great post on the slippery slope that is modern non-aesthetics. funnily enough, the subconscious mind tends to associate blues (and greys) with death and decay.

carloreply
July 25, 2012 at 11:06 AM

Thank you Lara for your poignant note. Blue and Grey are also the colors you find in the nuances of a weathered pair of jeans. Let’s look at the bright side of life!

Best from the B Team

The Running Bluereply
July 25, 2012 at 3:29 PM

Let’s offer this analysis to Baidu.com. I don’t think they have linked the colour with their favourite number (8). Olympics in 2008 started on 8/8/08 at 8 pm. And for that day the chinese managed to have a blue sky in Beijing despite all the pollution …. let’s see if the English can manage the weather as well on Friday …or we will get the usual cloudy/grey London sky….which number is that on the web….i dare the least clicked. The Running B. Blue

carloreply
July 25, 2012 at 3:59 PM
– In reply to: The Running Blue

Dear Running Blue,

the least clicked color is white. Some very cool (but unsuccessful) design website had a white mainpage with white links.
Didn’t work much…

TBT

The RBBreply
July 25, 2012 at 4:02 PM

White is the non-click zone..no wonder….The RBB

windhoundreply
December 6, 2012 at 6:26 PM

This is not just any old blue it is a so-called royal blue which contains red giving it a subliminal kick start from the attention point of view.

Leave a reply