ACBob's ZimZam - Blog

Blue is EVIL

2020-10-18 ◦ 3 Minute read

I was going to start this article with a quote about the colour blue, but i couldn't find any negative quotes.
Seems everyone is positive with blue. Much like an STD.

Now, you may have seen the title of the article and started a tangent along the lines of "WHAT?! BLUE IS A COLOUR! HOW CAN IT BE EVIL?!" and I'm here to say, that despite being the colour of the sky, ocean and some people's eyes, it is the most evil colour i can imagine. And no, it's not something to do with magic.

Specifically, it's evil in design - Web design. Blue is the colour of future, it symbolizes tranquillity, hope, etc. So it's almost the perfect colour for web design, right? wrong.

There's one crucial flaw - It's the colour of the sky. And you know what that means? Humans being a convoluted mess of instincts and behaviours thanks to evolution¹, causes blue to be an important colour to us. The sky is Blue when it is daytime. Evolution's natural progression means that, as a rather good assumption, the human mind takes blue to be a colour of 'Oh, sun's out, be awake!'.

That means, when you stare at your screen, you are lambasted by millions of pixels all displaying blue. Whether it's your phone, Laptop, or office computer. This is OK during the day-time, where you're supposed to be awake anyway. But, at night, when people use their phones to look on their various social media and laugh at the funny internet pictures, they're bombarded with Light.

Dark themes aim to solve this, but the majority of dark themes² have blue hues! - Take Discord, for example. The primary background colour is #36393F, which is perfectly nice, looks good in context, a nice colour all round - BUT of all the components in RGB, Blue is the strongest! 54 on Red, 57 on Green, and a whopping 63 on blue!³⁴

That means, despite making up 33.33% of the colour components, They account for 100% of the awfulness. You know what that blue does? It seeps into your eyeholes and casts an impression upon your brain, to hinder the production of sleepy chemicals⁵, and keeps you awake.

Now, there are some solutions to this, such as coming off of your devices a few hours earlier - But who's gonna do that? Not me, that's for sure!

So we must call upon the designers of the word, To stop using so much damn blue! Personally, I've taken steps to mitigate my use of blue in my projects. My OS uses a dark theme with low blue levels, This website is very green⁶ - leaving blue as a rare colour - and I even rectified my mistake of making the fiction section blue.

So, I ask - Beg, even Plead - web designers, to stop using blue!