Use of color in social media logos

[dsockrider]

In the 'Share This Page' and the icons at the top of the page, there are logos and icons that have been greyed out.

Color is such an important element of identity design, that when we take logos and icons and make them all light grey on a white background, the lack of color takes away from their identity and makes them harder to immediately identify. Also, on my laptop, I can barely see the 'envelope' because there's so little contrast.

Would it be possible to use the color logo/icon versions as the 'static state' to assist in identification, instead of just using the color version as the 'over state'?

The use of color assists with the communication and meaning of icons and logos.

[smeranda]

Color is an important part of design, however it can also be a distractor of design. During the implementation and testing of the social media tools (and the appliance icons at the top), it was discovered using the colors in these scenarios became too distracting/overpowering. Hence the reason to go with grayscale.

[dsockrider]

Yes, I understand how the top icons could be distracting with a splash of color when the only other color on the template page is red and tones of black.

How about making the social networking icons at the bottom of the page in their intended color? Color definately helps identify all the different logo icons, being at the bottom of the page they wouldn't be too distracting. I do like the way you can roll-over the icon and it gives a full title.

If another site would use the UNL logo on a page, and they greyed it out to the same extent, do you think it'd be as easily recognizable as the UNL logo?

[MarkHiatt]

I kind of like the way they are presented, now. They *are* subdued, because they aren't really what our pages are about. Nobody is going to visit a UNL page because it has SN icons and links. So that does pull away some of the attention they might otherwise earn. Maybe not attention, but "distraction".

But they do "light up" with rollover color. And as far as I know they roll over into their branded colors, don't they? I'm not in a lot of social networks, just Facebook and LinkedIn and something called Yammer, I think. The Facebook icon pops up in "Facebook Blue" and the LinkedIn icon comes in in the blue they use. Twitter's icon shows up in their aqua-esque color... so it seems to me that we are maintaining all of their branding information, aren't we?

I think we've hit upon a pretty good solution, actually.