Blue and Black Logos are the Most Popular Logo Colors for Brands

Color is a huge part of design. It’s one of the first things your eye processes when you absorb an object. And when it comes to the defining element of your brand, a logo, color communicates before people absorb the letters, numbers, and shapes. If you feel like you see the same blue and black logos everywhere, you’re not imagining it.

I actually reviewed the logos for the top brands in America and found that most of them use the same colors. For my study, I decided to go through the Fortune Global 500 list as a benchmark for successful, recognizable American companies.

Fortune 500 (2019) Companies

The Fortune Global 500 ranks of the top 500 corporations worldwide each year. They measure according to revenue. See the current list here.

The results were fascinating.

Blue and Black Logos Dominate the Top 100

A quick visual assessment of the top 100 companies reveals that blue, followed by red, and black are the most popular colors for logos. You’ll also notice that the shades of blue and red are very similar.

In fact, there were only a few companies in the Top 100 that deviated from these 3 colors.

This trend holds for the entire Fortune Global 500 list.

The Most Common Logo Colors

If you review all 500 companies, as I did, you’ll find that Blue (37%) and Black (31%) dominate the core colors for logos. Red is an obvious third at 13%.

Similar to the top 100, the tones of red and blue were also very close throughout the logos. Most were close to a pure hue.

Why are Black and Blue the most common colors?

There isn’t one contributing factor for the most common logo colors. However, there are a few chicken-egg reasons that have influenced this direction in design.

Printing History: Older, established brands began their promotions in the era of print. This meant that 4 color printing was more expensive. So, you would often see brands choose to do their logo in a single color or in two colors to save costs. Often, blue and red were chosen because they stood out against the black print of newspapers (the dominant medium.) These primary colors would print reliably and lend consistency to branding. Then, as the brands continued through the years, they kept their brand equity from using those tones.
Agency History: Although there are millions of designers and agencies around the globe today, advertising and marketing are fairly new industries. For a long time, only a handful of groups were working with all of the large brands. That led to a certain amount of similarity, especially among more conservative and established brands.
Color Psychology: Whether you believe in it or not, color psychology has had an outsized influence on how designers choose their tones. The way humans perceive color has been seen in several studies, such as a placebo effect with blue and red pills. These color guides are often taken into consideration when developing a logo.
The Market: Over time, people have started to associate certain colors with particular industries and brands. This is somewhat linked to the influence from each of the above factors. In market testing, brand research often reveals that people expect certain hues for certain types of brands.

Each of these factors has played a role in how these large companies initially chose and then, adapted their logos over time.

How to Choose a Good Logo Color

You may not like blue and black logos. That’s perfectly fine. If you’re trying to choose a good color palette for your own logo, keep in mind the following considerations.

Decide if you are mainstream or an outlier. If you want to associate yourself with the big brands in your industry, choosing one of the common colors is a safe choice. It will visually align you with them. If you want to disrupt your industry, try using a tone that is less common.
Consider the long-term use of your logo. Ideally, your brand will last past visual trends. Think about how your color will look if aesthetics change. If possible, you want to augment your logo with time, keeping the core colors and making small updates.
Think practically about how you will use your logo. The more colors you add, the higher your cost for any physical materials will be (print, embroidery, etc.). Also, bright or primary hues work well on screens, at a long distance, and sized down.

You can choose the best logo color if you think about how your brand sits in the greater context of the market.

Additional Reading

If you’re interested in learning more about logos, design and colors, check out the following information.

Emotional Reactions to Color by Kathy Lamencusa
Are You Selling the Right Colour? A Cross-cultural Review of Colour as a Marketing Cue by Mubeem M. Aslam
Color Red: Implications for applied psychology and marketing research by Chris Piotrowski
Aesthetic preference to color combinations: preference, harmony, and similarity by Karen B. Schloss and Stephen E. Palmer
Color Psychology by AlterSpark
Do You See What I See from Documentary Mania

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Methodology

To generate the numbers for my graphs, I started by pulling a list of the current Fortune Global 500 in November 2019. Then, I visually assessed each brand’s official logo. I used whichever version they identified as their main logo in their brand guide or press kit. So, some of them are technically wordmarks.

To select the primary color, I chose the most dominant color. If it was a close split, I chose the color in the wordmark part of the logo. If that was split, I represented the color as a split on the chart. For color choices, I stuck to the basic colors:

Red
Orange
Yellow
Green
Blue
Purple
Black
Brown
Grey

So, for example, if a logo was crimson, I labelled it red. If a logo was lavendar, I labelled it purple. These cases were rare as most of the tones were actually very straight primary colors for red and blue.

I also kept notes on the secondary colors.