The color quiz
You use these apps all the time, but can you identify the shades of their logos?
You’ve probably opened Facebook and Twitter tens of thousands of times in your life. But can you tell which hues of blue their logos are or the specific shades of the other apps you — and millions of other people — open every day?
Tech branding is ubiquitous across the websites, apps, and ads you see every day. So let’s see how well you know the logos of some of the most familiar platforms on the web. (And if your score can beat the average Verge staffer’s.)
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Netflix
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Snapchat
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Lyft
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Spotify
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Yelp
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Results
How the average results break down
Why is the quiz so hard?
Even though we might see a specific color many times throughout the day, it can be difficult to accurately commit that color to memory. “It’s hard for us to remember exactly what color we’re looking at and what color we saw yesterday,” says Marcie Cooperman, a color theory professor at The New School. “Very few people would do well on your color quiz.”
Sorry, everybody!
A closer look at how brands use color
Social media tends to skew blue — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Tumblr all use varying shades of it. Blue is also the world’s first recorded favorite color, based on polls taken in the 1800s. Twitter’s logo has been blue since the platform launched in 2006, but the first version, which was never released, featured some slimy green goo.
Netflix tried out a couple of brand colors and logos — purple and then yellow — before it landed on red in 2001, in a slightly darker shade than it uses now. Red has long been associated with the movies: red carpets, plush red theater seats, red ropes, and velvet curtains. And recently, Netflix has truly committed to being in the red.
Whereas Netflix picked red for the things it reminds people of, sometimes a color is chosen because its associations are less obvious. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel drew the original ghost logo, and he singled out this shade of yellow specifically because no other competing tech brands were using it.
Lyft leaned hard into its color choice right away: early marketing efforts featured pink mustaches attached to the grilles of cars. The company’s founders considered pink fresh and bold but also hoped it’d signal it wasn’t just another “masculine” rideshare company and help attract female riders and drivers.
Reddit’s original logo featured its robot icon — named Snoo — with a black outline and orange eyes, but in 2018, the company transitioned to the fully orange and white Snoo logo we know today. Reddit’s branding guidelines state, rather nonspecifically, that it chose the orange for its “vibrancy & distinctiveness.”
Spotify changed its shade from an “earthy” green to a neon green in 2015 in hopes of making things “pop” and appealing to millennials. There’s some science behind this: some studies suggest that we tend to favor brighter hues when we’re young, but our color preferences change as we age. The intensified hue led to lots of angry users. Everybody’s relaxed by now, but Spotify continues to unleash a variety of greens beyond its logo, which is what makes this question one of the hardest in this quiz. In fact, the brand uses a different color between its logo and its interface.
Blue is one of the default colors of the internet, from the color of links to the defining color of social media giants. But Mark Zuckerberg reportedly chose it because he is red-green colorblind, and blue is the color he sees most vibrantly. Facebook’s blue got brighter in 2019 as part of a branding overhaul.
McDonald’s famously adopted the color red because it supposedly stimulates people’s appetites, which is perhaps why so many food-related apps use it. Yelp updated its logo in 2021, slightly brightening its “iconic red.” Designer Michael Ernst said that he originally chose the color to avoid what he saw as an abundance of yellow and blue logos in the aughts.
