Case Studies Number Three--cnn.com:Color Palette

There are five colors used on any given page: blue, light blue, white, black and red.

Blue is used for links, and light blue is applied to visited links.

White is the main background on most of pages in the site. Main body text uses black as its color to make a contrast with the white background.

Red is used to emphasize importance of the content such as primary navigation labels, buttons and big headlines. It is also applied to links when mouse over them.

I think these colors used for a couple reasons. First, red is the color meaning "attention" or "alert" and it is appropriate to use red in a news site since most content on the site need attracting audience attention. Second, blue and red are the two main colors that used on politics too. Political news occupy a big part in cnn.com, especially the president election is a big topic that everyone talks about. Black and white are basic colors. Because red and blue are already there, if more colors add into the site, it will cause confusion and pages will look very messy. However, white creates more space between lines and words, it makes pages clean and organized. Therefore, these colors are chose to be the main theme colors for cnn.com.