How we extract colors from logos

Every logo on this site lists the colors that appear in the image, with both a human-readable name and a hex value. Here's how we work them out.

Two paths

Most logos are scored by an automated color extractor that picks out the dominant pixels in the image, snaps each one to the nearest named color (from a palette of about a thousand named shades), and writes down the exact hex. That's what you see on the "basic", "advanced", and "hex" color sections of older pages.

For our most popular logos we also run a vision model over the image that returns a small set of structured colors with names, roles (primary, secondary, accent), and prominence. Those are what you see on the color section of enriched pages -- the model gives us a cleaner short-list than the raw pixel extractor.

Why colors sometimes look unusual

The pixel extractor occasionally picks up shading, anti-aliasing, or near-white background pixels and reports them as colors. We try to suppress those, but the algorithm isn't perfect. If you're using a logo's exact colors for design work, prefer the hex values listed in the "Colors" section over the named approximations.

Naming

The "basic" set uses the 16 named CSS colors. The "advanced" / named set uses a much wider palette so the names ("dusty teal", "khaki") are more specific. We pick the closest match by Euclidean distance in RGB space.