Link of the Day: Color Palettes of the Most Popular Websites

Industry September, 26 2016 Nikolay Udintsev

Designer Paul Hebert compiled color palettes used by the ten most popular websites on the Internet.

Paul Hebert wrote a PHP script, which analyzed colors in HTML code and style tables of the 10 top websites in Alexa rating. Heberts study includes the main pages of Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Amazon, the Chinese search engine Baidu, and the Chinese social network Qq. He found that Yahoo and Twitter had the largest number of colors in their code, and Google and Baidu had the smallest number of colors.

After that, Hebert built charts of the most popular colors (represented by shades of blue and grey), color formats (websites mostly use Hex and RGBA codes), and a color wheel based on tones and saturation.

The author of the project did not analyze the obtained data, because he wanted to keep collecting information about colors of most popular website during a long period of time to study the trends in web design and draw conclusions about their differences in different countries. Hebert admits that his project has shortcomings: some colors from CSS websites are not used, but are still included in the scheme, and the colors from outside JavaScript codes are not included.

Photograph: Depositphotos