Much has been said about the role of color in the design of a brand. At just about any meeting where a client is talking about a new logo or branding concept, you’ll hear statements like, “Red grabs attention,” or, “Blue creates a sense of security.” There’s quite a bit of truth to statements like these. Walk into your local Target and tell me what color you see. And if you bank at Chase, you’ll notice that the logo is blue and the tellers wear blue shirts.
But does color have another importance beyond evoking a certain feeling?
According to a fun project recently run by signs.com, it’s the most remembered part of a brand. It turns out that when people are asked to recall a company’s logo from memory, the thing they’re most likely to get right is the color:
“The results show that most people are very good at recalling brand colors – around 80 percent selected the correct palettes for their drawings, while shapes and elements in logos are harder to recall.”
But how important is color…really?
Earlier this week, DropBox unveiled a new brand image that turned their recognizable blue box into an arrangement of five diamonds with no specific color. If you look at their web page about the project, it almost seems like they’ve lost their branding entirely. It’s a bold move, in my opinion…one that may or may not pay off. Either way, it will be interesting to see how their experiment plays out.
