Via Digg, I recently found a magazine scan from Wired Magazine that arranged corporate logos (I’m guessing from Fortune 500 companies) by their dominant colours. Unsurprisingly, a visible majority of those logos are blue. I’ve been wondering why people seem to like blue so much. Think about it: most operating systems are dominantly blue by default (bad ubuntu!). Heck, even denim jeans — western society’s greatest achievement — are predominantly blue!

Now I think I know why we tend to like blue so much: it’s because we’re really bad at it. Allow me to explain…

Human beings are equipped with three types of cone cells that perceive colour: (S)hort, (M)edium and (L)ong, each roughly coinciding with blue, green and red light. The wavelength range to which S-cone cells are sensitive, however, is much narrower than the other two, which in practice makes our eyes much less sensitive to blue.

Here at Koodoz, we’ve been victims of this tyranny of blue: our logo is red-ish, which means that any defects will be much more noticeable. Don’t believe me? check out some of the articles we’ve been featured on at Smashing Magazine and Noupe and compare our screenshots with any one of the fellow designers on those pages. Notice the ugly jpeg compression artifacts around our logo? Notice how most of the other screenshots “look better”, despite being compressed at the same level? We certainly did and it’s been a source of much frustration! <sarcasm>Thanks for not sucking, red cells!</sarcasm>.

If you still don’t believe me, I’ll prove it to you. First by using a CC-licensed picture of four lovely singaporean models and then by defacing our own logo (Marc won’t approve, he!).

Four lovely ladies

Consider the following picture:

Let’s decompose this image into its main channels, using Photoshop’s channel mixer tool, we get three images — red, green and blue respectively:

Finally, I’ll degrade the quality of each of the images, to simulate a low resolution jpeg, using the mosaic tool:

Not too good. Notice that the blue image is the hardest to make sense of? But what happens if we recompose the image using one degraded channel and two full-quality ones? This is where things get interesting. Take a look. All three images below have been exported with the same settings:

Degraded red channel

Degraded green channel

Degraded blue channel

Wow! The last one is almost the same, even though we completely destroyed the blue channel. Our eyes just don’t give a damn! The second one — where we altered the green channel — suffers the most. It turns out that we’re most sensitive to yellow-green light.

Defacing the Koodoz logo

To further prove my point, I will butcher our own logo, exporting it at a less-than-acceptable quality and then reproducing the results under different backgrounds. Here’s our original red logo, exported as a jpeg from Fireworks at 50% quality:

Not liking it. Jpeg artifacts all over the place.

Green background

Ouch! even worse!

Blue background

Not perfect but you can certainly get away with it!

Anyway, boys and girls, I guess it’s one of those QED moments. I’m just glad we didn’t pick green for our corporate identity!

Image Credits

Image credit for the four lovely ladies goes to Flickr User madaboutasia. The awesome picture of the dude with the shades is a self-portrait by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten. Thank you both for sharing your work.