![]() I often hear that blue was chosen as the hyperlink color for color contrast. What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one knows, but I have some theories. The ancestors of the blue hyperlinkīy looking at these pre-color hyperlink solutions, we can see how hyperlinks evolved over time and how these early innovations impact usability on the web today. To truly understand the origin and evolution of hyperlinks though, I took a journey through technology history and interfaces to explore how links were handled before color monitors, and how interfaces and hyperlinks rapidly evolved once color became an option. ![]() Mosaic, an early browser released by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina on January 23, 1993, had blue hyperlinks. I turned to my co-workers to help me research, and we started to find the answer. Culturally, we associate links with the color blue so much that in 2016, when Google changed its links to black, it created quite a disruption.īut now, I find myself all consumed by the question, WHY are links blue? WHO decided to make them blue? WHEN was this decision made, and HOW has this decision made such a lasting impact? I have advocated for the specific shade of blue, and for the consistent application of blue, yes, but I’ve never stopped and wondered, why are links blue? It was just a fact of life. As a user experience designer who has created websites since 2001, I’ve always made my links blue. Did you ever notice that many links, specifically hyperlinks, are blue? When a co-worker casually asked me why links are blue, I was stumped. The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted.
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