What Is With The Blue Hyperlinks?

Our use of blue hyperlinks (HTML Color Hex: #0000EE) in the body of our content is an artistic choice made to pay homage to the original blue hyperlink. We find beauty in simplicity and believe those that come before us deserve respect for providing us with the foundation by which we create. In this case, we honor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

How The Blue Color Was First Selected

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, is credited with making hyperlinks blue. These blue hyperlinks came as a result of a decision that he appeared to have reached randomly. While accessibility may not have been on Sir Tim’s mind at the time, the color choice was a happy one, according to Joe Clark in his book Building Accessible Websites (2002):

Can Everyone See Blue?

Red and green are the colors most affected by the color-vision deficiency. Almost no one has a blue deficiency. Accordingly, nearly everyone can see blue, or, more accurately, almost everyone can distinguish blue as a color different from others. It was pure good luck that the default color of hyperlinks is blue with underlining.

Blue Science

Red and green are detected by the same cells in the eye, and one of the most common forms of colorblindness is red-green colorblindness. It affects 7% of men and only 0.4% of women, but that’s still one person in 25 overall. So it made sense to choose a color that everyone could see and not mistake for black.