Brand Colors by Decade: Most Popular Hues of New Logos, 1950s to 2020s

Brand colors by decade at a glance

The short version: red never left, multicolour marks peaked twice, and blue took the lead only recently. Those patterns come from 42 brand marks introduced or redesigned between 1953 and 2023, four to seven per decade, each with a year and a colour confirmed by the company or a major news outlet.

The chart above stacks each decade’s marks by hue family. Read it as a sample, not a census. A decade with five marks can tip on a single redesign, so the counts matter as much as the winner. The 1980s, for instance, produced five marks in five different families, which means no hue dominated that decade at all.

One detail runs through every column. Red appears somewhere in 22 of the 42 marks, as a main colour or as part of a multicolour design. Blue appears in 12. No other hue comes close, and the gap between those two is the most stable finding in this set of brand colors.

The most popular brand colors of the 1950s and 1960s

The 1950s sample is small and split evenly between yellow and multicolour. McDonald’s put yellow neon arches on its restaurant buildings in 1953, and Shell simplified its yellow pecten in the mid-1950s. NBC introduced a red, green and blue chimes logo in 1954, then the first version of its peacock in 1956.

The peacock is the decade’s real story. It was made to announce colour television, and its eleven plumes turned a broadcaster’s mark into a demonstration of the product itself. NBC came back to the same idea in 1986, cutting the plumes to six. Few logos have been rebuilt around one argument so many times.

Multicolour carried into the 1960s. Chase Manhattan unveiled its geometric octagon in November 1960 in multiple colours, CBC/Radio-Canada adopted a rainbow butterfly in 1966 for its own colour launch, and Master Charge used interlocking red and ochre circles in 1968. Air Canada’s red rondelle, shown in 1964, was the decade’s single red mark.

Brand colors in the 1970s: the most varied decade

No decade in the sample spreads wider. Starbucks opened in 1971 with a brown siren, Shell’s 1971 pecten paired red and yellow, IBM’s striped logo of 1972 used a specific blue, and the CBC gem of 1974 set orange and red against blue. NBC’s 1976 letter N combined red and blue.

Then came the heart. I Love NY, drawn by Milton Glaser and launched as a state tourism campaign in 1977, used a plain red heart between black letters. It became one of the most copied marks of the century. In this dataset it counts as one red mark among six, which says something about the limits of counting.

Multicolour still led the 1970s by a single mark. Four of the six marks contain red, and three contain blue, the highest blue count of any decade in the sample. If you want to see why red and blue pair so often, the colour theory guide explains the contrast that makes the combination legible at a distance.

The 1980s and 1990s: red returns, black arrives

The 1980s produced the most even spread of brand colors by decade: Petro-Canada’s red leaf in 1980, NBC’s six-plume peacock and CBC’s blue gem in 1986, the green Starbucks siren of 1987 and Toyota’s black ellipses in 1989. Five marks, five families, no winner. That is unusual, and it is real.

The 1990s tilted back to red. CBC’s 13-piece gem of 1992 was red, Air Canada’s maple leaf of 1993 was red, and Shell warmed its yellow and red in the early part of the decade. MasterCard’s 1996 mark kept red and yellow circles. Apple dropped its rainbow in 1998 for a solid black or white apple.

That Apple decision joined a short line of monochrome marks. Black or monochrome appears four times in the sample, always from 1989 onward. Before Toyota’s black ellipses, no mark in this set relied on black alone. The full sequence of Apple’s and other changes sits in the logo redesign frequency report.

The most popular brand colors since 2000

The 2000s split between red and blue. Xerox went to a lowercase red wordmark in 2008, and Air Canada kept its red leaf in 2004. On the blue side, Chase made its octagon solid blue in 2004 and Samsung’s blue wordmark, with a published Pantone 286 C, dates from 2005. BP’s green and yellow Helios of 2000 was the outlier.

The 2010s were the second multicolour peak. Microsoft’s four squares of 2012, Google’s 2015 logo and Instagram’s 2016 gradient all reject a single primary colour, and Mastercard kept two overlapping circles. Starbucks went wordless in green in 2011, Air Canada turned black in 2017, and Dunkin’ dropped the word Donuts with an orange wordmark.

The 2020s, so far, belong to blue. Meta chose a blue infinity symbol in 2021, and Pepsi’s 2023 identity paired electric blue with black. CIBC moved from claret to a custom red in 2021, Burger King returned to orange buns, and X went black. The graphic design trends for 2026 guide covers where colour is heading now.

Brand colors by decade in Canada

Ten of the 42 marks are Canadian, and eight use red, six as the main colour. The run starts with Air Canada’s rondelle in 1964, a year before the country adopted its red and white maple leaf flag, and runs through Petro-Canada’s 1980 leaf, CBC’s 1992 gem, Air Canada’s later leaves and the 2021 CIBC logo.

The two exceptions are both CBC marks: the 1966 rainbow butterfly and the 1986 gem, the only Canadian mark in the sample built on blue. CBC/Radio-Canada and Air Canada each appear four times here, more than any other brand, which fits their long records of redrawn marks traced on the logos hub.

How the brand colors data was compiled

The sample holds 42 marks, four to seven per decade from the 1950s to the 2020s, ten of them Canadian. A mark is included only when a company history page, a company release or a major news outlet states or shows both its year and its colour. National symbols, such as the 1965 flag, are excluded.

Each mark gets one hue family from its primary colour; designs with no single main colour count as multicolour. Red and blue presence is also counted separately. Most hex values are representative of the named colour, not brand specifications. Small samples are the main limit: one redesign can change a decade’s leader.