Skip to content

There’s often a story behind why a certain item is a certain color (or colors), whether it’s a school bus, a barn, a referee’s shirt, a green screen, or the McDonald’s logo. So it seems safe to assume that blue was not an entirely arbitrary choice for hyperlinks on the Internet. Why, then, was it chosen?

For a while no one really knew. But user experience designer Elise Blanchard recently delved into Internet history to solve the mystery, sharing her findings in two articles published on Mozilla’s blog in 2021 and 2022, respectively. It all started around 1985, when students under the tutelage of University of Maryland computer science professor Ben Schneiderman conducted a series of experiments on how hyperlinks of different colors affect users.

“Red highlighting made links more visible, but reduced the user’s ability to read and retain the context of the text,” Schneiderman told Blanchard. Blue won. not only was it dark enough to show up on a white background and light enough to show up on a black background, but it “didn’t interfere with retention.”

The Internet interface was a hot topic in the mid-to-late 1980s; developers wanted to know which design elements worked better and which to standardize. So it’s no surprise that Schneiderman and his students’ extensive research on hypertext design and other related issues has been widely featured in journals and conferences.

Blue was a popular idea for hyperlinks. By the mid-1990s, it had appeared in some major software, including Tim Berners-Lee’s version of the WorldWideWeb browser and Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina’s Mosaic browser. The latter was licensed by Microsoft to create Internet Explorer, which also used blue hyperlinks on the fly.

Nowadays, the Internet is vast and diverse enough that it is not uncommon for a website to display hyperlinks in a color that complements the brand, such as orange. But there’s another reason sources sometimes recommend keeping blue.

Have a big question you’d like answered? If so, let us know by sending us an email bigquestions@mentalfloss.com.

[ad_2]

Comments

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *