James Bowskill is a British Art Director at A.C.O. Tokyo, where he develops brands on-line.

He also collects Japanese packaging, occasionally writes articles for Tokyo's web magazine PingMag, and is a member of London design team Superblue.

Why Are RSS Feed Buttons Orange? Nov 19 2005

It's easy to scan a page and find an RSS feed nowadays - we've been trained to look for the little orange buttons. But how did they become orange in the first place?

I was designing a custom RSS button for a client's site today, and without thinking, made it orange. Nothing else on the site is orange, and I realized that somewhere down the line, RSS buttons have taken this as their default.

100 RSS Buttons

One Colour to Rule Them All

Of course, it's not really important what colour it is, but that it's always the same colour. Orange is a high-visibility colour, so it'll always stand out on a page (unless that's an orange page of course, but there can't be too many of those around thank goodness). If RSS buttons had happened to become red, we'd have all got used to looking for red buttons by now.

So Why Not Red?

Colours are powerful. All colours carry connotations with them, some of which are very strong;

• Red would suggest an error, or warning.
• Green is often used for showing correctness, or completion.
• Orange however, is relatively neutral, it simply says "Hey! Look over here, I'm important!"

Why RSS?

Whilst several buttons have reliable images to go with them (such as an envelope for e-mail, or a printer for a print button), it's difficult to apply a meaningful icon to RSS. Perhaps more importantly, the term RSS itself isn't self-explanatory, so the user needed something to help identify it on a page.

Recently the team at Microsoft responsible for developing the RSS functionality in IE 7 have been writing about their design of the RSS button on the Team RSS Blog. Their current "Beta 1" icon is needless to say... orange.

Why Stop here?

It's certainly convenient being able to find the RSS button quickly on a page, so why stop there? Why not have colour-coded "contact", "submit" and "search" buttons and improve usability all round?

I think it boils down to how far you can expect people to comply. RSS is new - people are happy to be seen to be doing the latest thing - and a bright orange button helps them show that. But when you start to impose interface rules, you get designers complaining about unworkable colour-schemes, and it only takes a few exceptions to break the default.

I think RSS got lucky really. Like a Ferrari's got to be red, your feed's just got to be orange.