Almost 10 years ago, a Wired Magazine report pointed to blue and red as the most dominant colors in corporate america. Now a report on the colors of the top 100 web brands by colourlovers.com shows that blue and red still outshine the rest. But why?
Colors have different associations in different cultures. In China, the red color means prosperity and happiness. In the west means passion and power and of course is a powerful design accent color. Blue is used extensively to represent calmness and responsibility and dark blues are excellent for corporate branding were strength and reliability are important.
Many new brands choose colors that are category appropriate. Blue and red dominate many categories, so new companies tend to stay within the safety of those color ranges. Is it a good idea from the branding point of view? I don't think so. If branding is about differentiation I guess color experimentation (within reason) is a must.
Read more on the meaning of color.
Almost 10 years ago, a Wired Magazine report pointed to blue and red as the most dominant colors in corporate america.
During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C. Penney beat millions of websites to the top of the search results rankings on many competitive keywords such as "dresses", "furniture" or "home decor". J. C. even beat Samsonite on searches for "Samsonite carry on luggage". Not an easy thing to do, taking into consideration that Google's goal is to find the most relevant websites. Is it J. C. Penney a more relevant search result for Samsonite searches than Samsonite.com? So how this could have possible happened?
It turns out that J. C. Penney's Search Engine Optimization consulting firm used a "link scheme" a trick banned and highly penalized by Google, thousands of random websites with enormous amounts of keyword links to J. C. Penney's website landing pages which automatically made it the most relevant website for those keywords.
But the intriguing part of this story is that it took evidence collected by The New York Times for Google to take some action. Within hours Penney's rankings for many keywords went from number 1 to 70 and lower. Still why it took Google so long to detect such a blatant and widespread deception? it could be that the $2.46 million a month J. C. Penney spends on paid search ads made Google look the other way?
The European Union is already investigating possible antitrust abuses by Google. Money talks even for godly Google. Read the full story.
During the critical shopping months of the last holiday season J. C.
When Google claimed that in its Art Project's reproductions of painting master pieces "you can see things not normally visible to the human eye" there weren't kidding. After reading this article in the New York Times about Google's Art Project, a website that gives you access to a selection of high-resolution images of art treasures I was skeptical. After taking a close look at some of these paintings I almost fell off my chair. I can't explain the feeling of looking at, for instance, Vincent van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting so close and with such a detail that an inch of the painting becomes its own little masterpiece. Thanks Google!
When Google claimed that in its Art Project's reproductions of painting master pieces "you can see things not normally visibl
I highly recommend reading this thoughtful NPR article. It makes a good point about how we are constantly selling and buying (more than we realize), with every tweet and every Facebook and LinkedIn post. It made me stop in my tracks for a moment. Social media can be overwhelming and we are part of the reason why. As the article advices, maybe we should just pick and choose better what we put out there.
I highly recommend reading this thoughtful NPR. It makes a good point about how we are constantly selling and buying (more than we realize
