The brightest, most noticeable colors

The brightest colors available on the web are the most saturated colors. These are simply the colors in the upper right corner of the color picker.

Red (hex #FF0000)
Orange (#FFC000)
Yellow (#FFFC00)
Green (#FF0000)
Cyan (#00FFFF)
Magenta (#FF0000)

But not all colors can reach that brightest point. Let’s look at the ones that can.

The Brightest Color Among the Bright Colors

What if you wanted to use a color that is the brightest color of all brightest colors. For example, if you wanted your infographic to stand out in a Facebook feed or in a feed of Youtube video thumbnails? Could you “out-bright” all other bright colors? Yes.

The brightest color on your screen (or anywhere) depends on the light source. Right now you are most likely looking at OLED screen – an iPhone or MacBook, for example. The brightest color of OLED light is yellow, bordering on green. Here is how bright (the technical term is “intensity” or “saturation”) colors can be on an OLED screen. You can see right away that blue, for example can never be as bright as yellow. Any green is brightest than blue but dimmer than yellow.

The Y axis is intensity, the X axis is wavelength (the wave that hits your retina when you look at this color)

What does this all mean for you? It means that if you share an infographic with a bright-yellow background people will notice it first even in a sea of other infographics that are not yellow.

If you are designing an app, a yellow thumbnail will make the app easier to find on an iPhone screen full of other apps that are not yellow.

So as long as you are looking at a screen like the one you are looking at right now, yellow will be the brightest color you see. The closest color to this yellow is the color of Snapchat and Pingdom’s landing page. Notice that because this yellow is so incredibly bright, the only complementary colors are black and white.

What if you wanted a bright blue. Blues are in general low intensity. Every color’s intensity is limited. Blue is more limited than green. Yellow is the least limited of all.

How to Use Bright Colors To Get Attention

Let’s look at an infographic with the brightest background color possible.

How are your eyes doing? Hurting yet? It caught your eye, though, right? But probably a little too much. Let’s send your eyes on vacation – look below.

It’s not as exciting over here, but now you can actually read.

So do you have to choose between the two colors? No. You can have it both ways – share the bright colored graphics on social media and have a readable desaturated version on the blog for people to read.

You can do this color change with one click in Adioma, the infographic maker I use.