The color blue

If you can't describe it, does a thing exist? Also, the color of my sofa. And, 7 other things worth your time.

A while back, when I was originally setting up this newsletter, I made a very quick decision.

I chose the colors blue and white for the color scheme. It was really just a matter of clicking a few boxes in the dashboard on Substack, which is the platform where I run this whole thing.

Why blue? Well, I like the color. But the bigger reason is that large digital media brands like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram, and even newsletters like Morning Brew and the Skimm, all use shades of blue on white.

I didn’t have a big team of editors and researchers to study user experience and figure out if certain colors on a website make readers stick around a tenth of a second longer than others.

But, I figured those brands all did.

So, blue won. However, it hasn’t always been that way.

In fact — here we go, another thing I got sucked into, and maybe the entire world realized this a while back but I just learned it: It turns out that the color blue … hasn’t always existed.

Well, not for everyon…