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Green means go.
Red means stop.
Yellow means floor it!

"The light is green; the trap is clean."
Ray Stantz, Ghostbusters (1984)

Vision is the one sense we humans rely on the most. We usually identify things by sight rather than sound or smell. It is for this reason that creators of visual media will make sure that things look different enough for the audience to easily recognize and tell apart. It can also be a form of visual shorthand for characterization, so that the audience can tell certain things about a character or setting without having to be told.

In addition to the audience, this trope may be used in-Universe so that the characters can easily tell the difference between groups or things.

One way to do this is to use color as an indicator that two things are different (when using different colours) or two things belong to the same category (when using the same colors). Color can indicate who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, they can indicate personality type, they can say things about gameplay elements in a video game, which organization or group the person belongs to, et cetera.

In Real Life colors are often used to distinguish everything from the meaning of lights, to wires, labels, faucets and other signs.

Bright, contrasting colors, particularly primary and complementary colors, are the most common. Regardless what they're used to symbolize, when things are color coded you can almost always count on a Red and a Blue. Further seeing a Green or a Yellow is also common. Purple and Orange are more rare unless you have enough units for a full Rainbow Motif or more.

Named for a scene in The Order of the Stick, where two characters are discussing Good Colors, Evil Colors as it applies to dragons.

Compare Good and Evil for Your Convenience, Sound-Coded for Your Convenience, Dress-Coded for Your Convenience.


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Examples:

Please only list examples that do not fall under one of the above sub-tropes.

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    Alternate Reality Games 
  • Omega Mart: Instead of spills having dedicated signs in Omega Mart, they are instead designated by cones. Wet spills are magenta, dry spills are orange, and "difficult" spills are Ecru/off-white (which doesn't help at all since the floors are checked white and black). When the "difficult" spill gets too big to ignore or starts affecting equipment, it's then changed to an aqua cone. A poster inside of the physical store also lists an additional green cone to mark "temporal obstructions."

    Anime & Manga 
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba:
    • In the manga, with Gotouge's coloring, all the imperial japanese military inspired uniforms the slayers wear are all standard black; the anime, however, decided to add some unique touches to said uniforms by differentiating them through colorful shadings formed around the black fabric, examples being Tanjiro's uniform with brown shading, Zenitsu's with bege shading, Inosuke's pants with dark blue shading, Muichiro's with teal shading and so on among the slayers as portrayed in the anime.
    • Hantengu's emotions have unique color schemes indicated by their eyes and clothing. Sekido (Anger) is red, Karaku (Relaxed) is green, Urogi (Joy) is yellow, and Aizetsu (Sorrow) is blue. Zohakuten (Hatred) is associated with gold to emphasize its great power.
  • Is the Order a Rabbit?: In the manga, Chino mentioned the town requires that its buildings to show the occupations of the occupants by this trope. For example, fishmongers will need to paint their houses blue, and bakers pink.
  • In Mission: Yozakura Family: Each of the Yozakuras is associated with a particular color, which shows up in their hair and eyes.
    • Taiyo — Red.
    • Mutsumi — Navy blue.
    • Kyoichiro — Black.
    • Futaba — White.
    • Shinzo — Green.
    • Shion — Pink.
    • Kengo — Yellow.
    • Nanao — Teal.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The three dorms in Duel Academia, Osiris Red, Ra Yellow, and Obelisk Blue, reflect the test scores and prestige of their respective students (or if they are a girl). Ra Yellow for instance is for students who took the High School exam and achieved a good score. In season 4, the Academia Duel Disks are replaced by newer models that match the colors of the respective dorms and they serve as true indicators of who belongs to which dorm, since it would be impossible to guess that Manjoume (who wears a black coat that has nothing to do with the school's attire) and Rei (who still wears the Osiris Red uniform) have been promoted to Obelisk Blue in that season.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, this trope gets a lot more complicated.
    • First of all, each of the four dimensions is associated with a main colour: red for Standard, purple for Fusion, green for Synchro and blue for Xyz. This tends to get referenced in indirect ways, such as the Four Heavenly Dragons glowing in their respective colors, or the users of the various summoning methods having a hint of those colors in their appearance.
    • Academia still follows the Red/Yellow/Blue theme from above, with the addition of purple for the highest ranks (teachers, elite members etc). This in turn, with the rare — and justified — exception, makes it very easy to identify its current or former members. It also serves are Foreshadowing in some cases.
    • The members of La Résistance wear a red scarf somewhere on their bodies.
    • Finally, a number of duelists include a hint of their summoning methods in their clothing. For example Gongenzaka, Yaiba, Yugo and Jack Atlas (Synchro users) all dress primarily in white, the Xyz users follow a very dark colour motif, or the two Ritual users wear something blue.

    Arts 
  • Sistine Chapel: Moses can be identified amongst the chaos that surrounds him (ranging from storms to an army drowned in blood) by his green and yellow robes, which he wears even in paintings made years apart by different artists.

    Comic Books 
  • JLA/Avengers: In the collectors' edition, DC Comics is blue and Marvel Comics is red. Stan Lee's text is red, Julius Schwartz's text is blue, the title for Marvel's explanation for the cancellation of the original crossover is red, the title for DC's rebuttal is blue, and the reference page shows DC characters and places' names in blue while Marvel characters and places are red. Of course, this goes back even further to the Marvel Versus DC crossover where the very personifications of the companies and their universes had these colors, probably because of their logos.
  • The Pitiful Human Lizard: The Majestic Rat has dyed his legions of rats in various colours to split them up into teams. This allows him to better coordinate their movements.
  • In Violine, the doctor has various pills, whose functions are differentiated by colour.
  • In White Sand, the Sand Masters are big on using colours.
    • Sand Master applicants wear brown robes, while full Masters wear white ones.
    • Within the diem, each rank has a sash of a proper colour.
  • In Zodiac Starforce, though the Zodiac forms are predominantly light blue and white, each member of Starforce has their own colour scheme: Kim is blue, Molly is red, and Savanna is green. Emma takes the cake, since her uniform is almost completely pink and red.
  • The lighting inside the time machine of the Blake and Mortimer story "The Time Trap" changes colour depending on the time period: white corresponds to present time, then as it travels further away from it it turns yellow, red, blue, etc (it is red in the Middle Ages, purple in the prehistoric era, and green in the 51st century).
  • Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons: Each of the gods has a prominent associated color - for example Zeus is blue and Ares is red, where Artemis is associated with brown/red/rust, Dionysius is purple and Demeter with green and golden.

    Fan Works 
  • In Clouded Sky, there are temples dedicated to each Pokémon type, and the acolytes of the temples dress in colors that correspond with the type their temple represents (Fire Temple = Red, Water Temple = Blue, etc.).
  • In The Dimensional Drifter, this is brought up as a plot point. Judai, Johan and Sora's Non Uniform Uniforms all follow the strict colour-coding of Academia's ranking, so everyone who sees them immediately assumes they all are acquainted and go to the same school — even the three duelists themselves. Judai and Johan use that to trick Sora into believing he's among allies.
  • A Growing Affection has Shozokus, a certain ninja army who wear full stealth uniforms color coded by rank and approximate skill level (see the fic's main page for the full list).
  • J-WITCH Series:
    • Quintessence energy is colored differently depending on who uses it — for Nerissa, it's white, while for Will it's pink and for Drago, it's dark red.
    • In "A Demon's Wings in the Witches' Town", the Salem Witch Trial ghosts are tinted red when Drago summons them, but shift to yellow after turning on him.
  • Kill la Kill AU:
    • In comic 32, nurses / doctors tend to wear what the colors of their corresponding wards are, i.e intensive care workers are seen wearing light or yellow green and psychward doctors are wearing slate or lavender.
    • Nui, Ryuko, and Satsuki's blankets when they were babies, as Satsuki's was blue, Nui's pink, and Ryuuko's was red. This is more apparent in comic 9, when Ragyo was almost handed a baby Kaneo Takarada who is in the yellow blanket and was later handed her own child who's shown to be in red blanket.
  • The Legend of Total Drama Island features color coding in a couple of the challenges:
    • During the paintball deer hunt, the contestants playing the deer wear tails and antlers in their team colors. The hunters likewise have paintballs in their team colors, with each hunter having a different shade so the scorekeeper can tell at the end who hit whom.
    • For the marksmanship training in the boot camp challenge, which also uses paintball guns, every player has a different color of paint to show in a viewer-friendly manner who hits what.
  • In My Brave Pony: Starfleet Magic, unicorns of a certain color tend to live in a specific area of Unicornicopia. For example, blue unicorns live in Bluesville. The only remotely clever name is O-Range for orange unicorns.
  • The Powers of Harmony: Each Element of Harmony has a particular color attached to it:
    • Generosity: Silver
    • Laughter: Blue
    • Magic: White
    • Loyalty: Red
    • Kindness: Pink
    • Honesty: Green
  • In The Power Within the Founders are dressed in the primary color of the Hogwarts Houses associated with them.
  • In Peter Parker's Field Trip (Of course it's to Stark Industries), the different level badges for admission through Stark Tower come in different colors. Level 0 (visitors from other companies) is white, Level 1 (civilian visitors) is a pale blue. Level 2 (general staff) is green, level 3 (higher-level interns) is purple, level 4 (top-level engineers and scientists) is silver, and level 5 (Tony Stark, Pepper Potts, the Avengers, Peter Parker and special elected people) is red and gold.
  • In Purple, the first thing Hordak did to return to some semblance of normalcy was die his hair blue and his eyes and mouth red like it originally was. Taking a page from him, the various Horde clones that now populate Etheria have their own dyed colors as a way of learning how to be independent, Wrong Hordak/Kadroh adopting Entrapta's shade of purple in particular.
  • Invoked in New Beginnings (Smallville): When Clark's assembled team of heroes are preparing to face the Disciples of Zod, Oliver provides different-coloured leather jackets for all of them, even when some (such as Kyla) don't 'need' clothes to use their abilities.
  • Cheating Death: Those That Lived opts to reuse the district colors present in the movie, from Mizar's bottle green outfit to Platinum's avocado green coat.
  • Tales of the Hunger Games has "district colors" that are quite different from the film counterpart. Reaping-aged children in the series outside are seen wearing formal outfits in their designated colors. And for some arenas, their outfits would be in those colors.
    • District 1 — Scarlet
    • District 2 — Gold
    • District 3 — Yellow
    • District 4 — Blue
    • District 5 — Silver
    • District 6 — Black
    • District 7 — Brown
    • District 8 — Purple
    • District 9 — Beige
    • District 10 — Orange
    • District 11 — Green
    • District 12 — Teal
  • As Panem Reborn is based on Tales, the author opts to reuse the district colors for 1-11. However, the universe includes a "District 15" (what used to be most of France), where the designated color is lavender.
  • In The Peer Gyntening, all of Cameli's attacks have a color to indicate their direction. Orange attacks move towards the right, purple attacks to the left, green attacks go upwards, and blue attacks go downwards.

    Films — Animation 
  • The Bad Guys (2022):
    • All things related to the Bad Guys are in warm colors, not just to stand in contrast to the police's blue uniforms, but also to signal allegiances in the story. Notably, during the Golden Dolphin heist, Diane, at that point a Hero Antagonist, is wearing pink, foreshadowing her true role long before the second act.
    • Blue is used to symbolize antagonistic forces that disrupt the Bad Guys's lives. The police wear blue throughout the film, Marmalade wears blue in the first act, the Bad Guys themselves wear blue tuxedoes to the Charity Gala when they're winning the public over but are still wearing them when they're framed for the theft of the meteorite, which nearly destroys their lives, and the Love Crater Meteorite glows blue throughout the third act.
  • Disney:
    • Bambi: During Bambi's fight with Ronno, it's easy to tell who's winning by looking at the colors on their shadows and the background. If Ronno is winning, the background colors are dark green, blue and black. If Bambi is winning, the colors are yellow, orange, gold, and sometimes pink.
    • Aladdin has color motifs based on its desert setting. Blue (water) = good, red (heat) = evil, and yellow (sand) = neutral.
    • The Lion King II: Simba's Pride: Used symbolically. Before the final battle, the Outsiders trudge through a swamp, which darkens their coats right before facing Simba's pride. Right when Kovu and Nala show up to give their "Not So Different" Remark, the mud has been mostly washed off by the rain, enforcing the fact that the two groups really are the same and don't need to fight anymore.
    • The Nightmare Before Christmas: Christmas Town, Halloween Town, "The Normal World", and the Forest all have different color palettes, making them easier to distinguish from one another.
    • The Princess and the Frog:
      • Dr. Facilier wears a black Baron Samedi-esque outfit while Mama Odie wears white, which is the traditional color for voodoo garb. This also fits with the way they represent shadow and light respectively.
      • Purple, traditional hallmark of comic book villains, is part of the Doctor's costume and no-one else, even though it's one of the standard Mardi Gras colors (Purple, Green and Gold).
      • The person who devised the color script made a conscious decision to include the three Mardi Gras colors: Facilier has purple in all of his scenes (since, of the three colors, purple is the most "unnatural"), the scenes in the swamp with frog Tiana and Naveen are green, and Mama Odie's scenes and Tiana's restaurant fantasies are awash in gold.
    • Wreck-It Ralph:
      • According to the film makers, the characters colored venomous green are the ones who are truly evil. Note that Ralph is entirely green during his Hulk-like rampage through the stands. They were going to color Vanellope that way to signify her glitch status until they figured it made her look like a zombie. You can see what she would have looked like with green skin on the sign in the bakery forbidding glitches from entry.
      • Ralph and Felix themselves may count. Felix is dressed in mostly blue, the color for peace and serenity, while Ralph is dressed in mostly red, the color for intensity and anger.
      • Also, whenever Vanellope glitches, she turns shades of blue. However, King Candy a.k.a. Turbo turns shades of red when he is forced to glitch out.
  • Epic (2013): The rich greens and golds of the forest (the use of yellow contributing to the 'warmness'), versus the cold colour palette and mud-browns of Mandrake and his allies. Also, the brightness of the forest, compared to the relatively subdued colours used in the house.
  • Toy Story 3: Blue is safe (Andy's room, the Butterfly Room, the conveyor belt off switch, the light that shines on the toys when the aliens rescue them from the incinerator), red is unsafe (the Caterpillar Room, Lotso, the incinerator), and sickly chartreuse is corrupted (the vending machine "gambling parlor", the daycare dumpster). Bonnie's color is bright "happy" green.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • As a general rule, absent any other cues like dialogue or geography (and often enough even with them), a rising sun is depicted as red and a setting sun as orange in all films. This is just a cinematographer's convention that's gone back to the early days of color film.
  • In the Brotherhood series of films, the hero always wears white boxers, while all the other villanous characters wear black underwear.
  • In Back to the Future, the DeLorean's LED displays are red for "Destination Time", green for "Present Time", and yellow for "Last Time Departed", in homage to 1960's The Time Machine. In Back to the Future Part III, Doc has made presto logs, color-coded green, yellow and red in increasing order of the amount of heat each produced to make their train run faster, with a corresponding gauge showing when it would happen.
  • Con Air: The prisoners. Normal inmates get Blue, the really scary ones get Orange, and the pants-wettingly scary Steve Buscemi gets White.
  • The Great Wall: Soldiers in the Chinese army wear monochromatic armor, the color of which designates the type of troop they are.
  • The Heroic Ones has a Big Badass Battle Sequence halfway through where the two Warrior Princes (Played by David Chiang and Ti Lung) leads their army into crushing the rebels. The two princes are dressed in contrasting colours - the older prince wears a black fur tunic over his white uniform, whilst the younger prince wears a white fur tunic over his black uniform. Meanwhile, rebels and redshirts alike all wears identical clothing.
  • Guillermo del Toro's vision for The Hobbit included eight color-coded "seasons" (middle of third paragraph).
  • The Hunger Games: The jackets of the tributes while in the arena.
    • District 1 — Avocado Green
    • District 2 — Rust Red
    • District 3 — Mustard Yellow
    • District 4 — Seastorm Green
    • District 5 — Plum Purple
    • District 6 — Tomato Red
    • District 7 — Russet Brown
    • District 8 — Goldenrod Yellow
    • District 9 — Bottle Green
    • District 10 — Foie Gras Grey
    • District 11 — Chocolate Brown
    • District 12 — Coal Black
  • In The Hunt for Red October, different color lighting was used for each submarine's interior to aid the viewer in quick recognition of which submarine it was and to minimize confusion.
  • In Jason's Lyric, Jason often wears between blue or orange; signifying his gentle-but-tough demeanor. Lyric often wears white; reflecting her innocence, dreamy and nurturing traits.
  • In John Carter, the otherwise nearly-identical Red Martians of Helium and Zodanga are differentiated by the Heliumites wearing blue capes while the Zodangans have red. This is even acknowledged during the climax when, as Tars Tarkas is about to attack Kantos Kan and another Red Martian, they show him their blue capes and tell him they're Heliumites and, therefore, his allies.
  • Jurassic Park: The first movie uses certain color conventions, according to a fan analysis on the Jurassic Park Legacy website. Dr. Grant, the hero, wears the "hero colors" of red and blue, while Dr. Sattler wears similar but more feminine shades of pink and purple. Hammond, the park's creator, and the one accused of "playing god", wears all white and has a white beard, while Malcolm wears black to emphasize his opposition to Hammond and his "chaotic" nature.
  • In Kamen Rider X Super Sentai Superhero Taisen, Kamen Rider OOO will lend his medals to the Gokaigers, allowing them to transform into OOO's combo forms. With one exception, the general coloring of OOO's combos match up with the Gokaigers' colors (red, blue, yellow, green, and white [standing in for silver]), and they transform accordingly. The exception is Gokai Pink, who instead gets the purple combo.
  • In Logan's Run, the people who lived in the city wore clothes that matched their ages and the color of their life clocks. The sandmen, who were essentially portrayed as being evil, wore black and gray, even when they were in the gym or at home.
  • Look Both Ways (2022): The Los Angeles reality is denoted with pink, orange and yellow costume and set design; the Austin reality with grays, greens, and blues. If Natalie from the LA reality visits Austin, her warm wardrobe stands out among the cool colors; similarly, when Natalie from the Austin reality visits LA, she wears cool colors among the warm set design.
  • In The Mark of Zorro, a 1920 silent film, Zorro instructs his allies to ride black horses on their night's mission to rescue some unjustly jailed prisoners. The soldiers that pursue them conveniently all have light-colored horses, making it easy for viewers to keep track of which band of riders is which.
  • Romeo & Juliet (2013)'s costuming: reds and earth tones for the Montagues, blues and greens for the Capulets. Romeo's bluer wardrobe fits his alignment with Juliet and her family.
  • M. Night Shyamalan: The three main characters of the Eastrail 177 trilogy — David Dunn, Kevin Wendell Crumb, and Elijah Price — are subjected to this in their wardrobes and lighting. David is portrayed in dark greens, Kevin in tan orange, and Elijah in royal purple. By the final scene of Glass, prior to which all three have died, these colors have passed to each one's respective supporting character — Joseph Dunn, Casey Cooke, and Mrs. Price.
    • Glass also features Dr. Ellie Staple, whose scenes and wardrobe are cast in a shade of dull, washed-out pink. This foreshadows the fact that she plays into the Hero/Villain system of this series far more directly than she appears to.
  • In The Social Dilemma, the Advertising, Engagement, and Growth algorithms in Cyberspace are colored yellow, purple, and blue.
  • In Star Wars, this tends to overlap with Good Colors, Evil Colors, such as the blue and green lightsabers of the Jedi vs. the red of the Sith (as well as their brown robes vs. black robes) and the silver and red of the Rebellion vs. the blue and black (and white) of the Empire.
    • At the start of the Clone Wars, Republic Clonetroopers used different colored insignias to identify their ranks. With the switch to Phase II armor that allows for custom paintjobs, the colors passed to identify different units, such as the 212th Attack Battalion in orange, the 501st Legion in blue, and the Coruscant Guard in red.
    • During the Clone Wars Republic ships and vehicles featured red markings (diplomatic ships from the galactic capital of Coruscant had a full red paintjob, and the Coruscant Guard got its red markings from being stationed there), while Separatist ones had blue ones. The 501st Legion having blue markings on their troopers' armor while being a Republic unit serves as a subtle Foreshadowing that Palpatine actually controls both sides and Anakin, the 501st commander, will end up as The Dragon for it.
  • Top Gun has the heads-up displays in green for the good guys and red for the bad guys. In reality, they were and mainly still are all green, given the behaviour of the high-performance green-screen cathode ray tube displays used to ensure they're readable in bright sunlight. The green displays shown in the film are nothing like accurate representations of a real F-14's HUD in any case, although there's no such thing as a MiG-28, so it's hard to say that this is entirely wrong - but it's highly implausible.
  • Traffic (2000) uses different colored filters to distinguish the various locations and storylines. For example, Mexico is yellow, while the politician storyline is blue.
  • TRON:
    • In the first movie, free programs are blue, while characters affiliated with the MCP are red. CLU, while loyal to Flynn, is colored yellow, because he originates from outside ENCOM's servers. Flynn, a user, is also colored blue.
    • TRON: Legacy uses this to great effect. Free programs are blue, while "rectified" and reprogrammed programs are red. This time, Users are colored white, as are special programs like Tron and the ISOs. CLU initially starts off white, as he was meant to be Flynn's double to build the Grid in his absence, but assumes the yellow of the original CLU once he pulls a Face–Heel Turn. White and blue characters are considered good guys, but in multiple cases, characters of both colors oppose the protagonist out of circumstance.
  • In West Side Story (1961) the two rival gangs have different colors to identify them — the Jets (the Caucasian gang) predominantly wear blue, brown and gray (with some yellow) while the Sharks (the Latino gang) predominantly wear red, black and purple (with the occasional pink thrown in here and there). Counts as Truth in Television, since real-life gangs are visually distinguishable.
  • In Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (2018), the humans of Seabrook all wear light or pastel colors, especially pastel pinks and blues, while the zombies wear dark shades of red, green, and grey.

    Literature 
  • Air Awakens: Royal family of the Solaris Empire dresses in white and gold, blue is the color of the South, red of the West and purple of the East. And only sorcerers wear black.
  • All The Skills - A Deckbuilding LitRPG: Dragon colors usually determine their powers, though there are always exceptions.
  • Animorphs: Andalite technology tends to be based around the colors blue and white. Yeerk tech (at least that used by Visser Three) is usually black and red.
  • Aurora Cycle: Each of the six specialties of the Aurora Legion is assigned a different colour:
  • Barbie: The "Barbie and Friends Book Club" series are each tinted with a different colored ribbon that stretches around the binding and back cover indicating the genre of the book:
    • Adventure stories are green.
    • Imaginative stories are pink.
    • Mystery stories are blue.
    • Stories about Barbie having a special job or career are purple.
  • In Brave New World society, each caste wears a different color
    • Alphas wear gray
    • Betas wear mulberry
    • Gammas wear green
    • Deltas wear khaki
    • Epsilons wear black
  • Captive Prince: The country of Akielos favours red, while its rival country of Vere favours blue. The lines start to blur late in the series, especially as the Veretian Regent moves to claim Akielos' throne for himself.
  • Chronicles of Chaos: Used in Orphans of Chaos. When using her higher senses, Amelia can see the utility of nearby objects to her or someone else by how brightly they glow with a white light.
  • Circleverse: The Trader people assign colors to aspects of life and follow them completely. Mourners wear all red, children are often dressed in blue to guard against evil, and Trader mages wear head-to-toe yellow.
  • In Divergent, it's very easy to tell who belongs to what faction based on their attire:
    • Candor typically dresses in black and white, reflecting their mindset.
    • Abnegation dresses in grey, rag-like clothing, reflecting their humility and putting others before themselves.
    • Amity dresses in bright colors, usually yellows and reds, reflecting their laid-back, free-spirited nature.
    • Dauntless members can usually be spotted sporting black combat uniforms.
    • Erudite dresses in blue formal attire befitting their intellectual nature.
    • As expected, the Factionless subvert this trope; they dress in whatever they can get their hands on, and it's exactly this lack of uniformity that makes them so easy to tell apart from those in a Faction.
  • In Dragon and Damsel, dragon subspecies each have different colored scales. The scale color of a dragon determines what type of magic they are most proficient in.
  • Dragonlance:
    • The Towers of High Sorcery actually enforce this trope, as each of the three Orders worships and draws power from one of the three gods of magic which are represented in Krynn's sky by three different-colored moons. Good-aligned mages are associated with Solinari, the white moon; neutral mages with Lunitari, the red moon; and evil mages with the hidden black moon, Nuitari. Mages traditionally wear white, red, or black robes to display their alignment. When Raistlin transitions from neutral to evil in Dragons of Spring Dawning, his robes change from red to black.
    • Subverted in one Dragonlance short story. A knight slays what he thinks is a white dragon, which are Always Chaotic Evil. It turns out, however, that the dragon in question was an albino silver dragon (silver dragons are Always Lawful Good).
  • In Dragonriders of Pern, the dragons are visually distinguishable by gender and caste by their color. Additionally, many of the disciplines have a distinctive color that members of the guildhall wear. Miners, crafters, harpers, and healers each have a distinctive uniform color, with further variations in tone for apprentices, journeyman, and masters.
  • In The Enchantment Emporium, each Dragon Lord has a different highlight for their scales in dragon-form. And while walking around in human-form... the color show in their irises instead (for easy identification, if you don't know their name yet).
  • When The Famous Five stay in caravans, their colours are often mentioned.
    • Five go off in a Caravan: The boys have the green caravan (with red curtains), and the girls have the red caravan (with green curtains), because Anne loves red. One of the caravans becomes very important in the second half of the book, although interestingly, it is not stated until very late on which colour caravan it is.
      Anne: I do like the red one, bags I the red one!
    • Five have a Wonderful Time: The Five stay in old-fashioned caravans. The red one, picked out in black and yellow, is Julian and Dick's. The blue one, picked out in black and yellow, is George's and Anne's. Oh sorry, Timmy's too.
  • In Factory of the Gods, many of the items Julian can create, such as Godseyes and Grasping Hands, are color coded to make it clear what their function is. Red Godseyes detect heat, Blue Godseyes detect movement, etc.
  • In Fallen series by Lauren Kate fallen angels who since the Fall have sworn loyalty to Lucifer have wings in the shades of gold, while fallen angels who have sworn loyalty to the Throne have wings in the shades of silver.
  • Invoked by Jiang Ziya in Fengshen Yanyi: early on, he's used to divide the Zhou forces under his command into five big battalions colored after the five elements and directions (blue/green for the east, white for the west, red for the south, black and purple for the north and yellow for the center), each group following the orders given by the appropriately-colored banner. However, as he prepares for the campaign against Shang, he purposefully changes all signalation flags, making them all bright crimson but adorned with smaller fringes and lining of the five above-mentioned colors. As he explains to his generals, it's a ruse to keep coordinating the soldiers in combat while at the same time keep the enemy in the dark about their actual movements. True to his word, the enemy soldiers have a hard time reading the enemy movements because all banners appears crimson to them.
  • In The Giver, blue (or at least "pale") eyes are linked to the special Receiving ability.
  • "Harap Alb", a Romanian folk tale, has the Green and Red Emperors. While Green is a wise, old ruler and the protagonist's kindly uncle, Red is a cruel, unstable tyrant, against which the protagonist is warned:
    Harap Alb's father: Beware of red-haired men and especially the bald.
    • In folkloric context, both baldness and red hair are traditionally considered bad omens placed by God to mark dangerous men.
  • Harry Potter:
    • Tonks, who can change her appearance at will, favours bright pink as a hair color. In the film of Order of the Phoenix, it was changed to purple, because the filmmakers had already associated the colour pink with Umbridge. Interestingly, Umbridge doesn't wear quite as much pink in the books (only her cardigans are described as pink), though it was obviously done to emphasize the Sickeningly Sweet effect.
    • In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the Weasley twins describe to Harry one of their inventions — a Puking Pastille. Biting its orange end will make you vomit, and biting its purple end will make it stop. The rest of their "Skiving Snackbox" candies have the same pattern.
  • Played in The Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan. Orange and purple for the Greek and Roman camps, respectively.
  • The Hunger Games: In the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen and Peeta wore coal black jackets.
  • I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level: Hand Waved regarding the slimes that Azusa kills every day for petty cash — dark-colored slimes are good; light-colored slimes are evil and fair game for slaughter. What exactly could account for the moral compass of a non-sapient blob is left unexplained.
  • Most religions in the Liavek Shared Universe anthologies are identified by color: red for the Way of the Twin Forces, black for the Kin of One Path, white for the Church of Truth, green for the House of Responsible Life, and brown for the Pardoners. There are two more color-coded religions — blue and gold — that have been exiled from Liavek, and one non-colored religion, the Way of Herself. The clergy of any religion are almost always called (Color) Priests.
  • In Lord of the Flies, the main characters are mostly shown to be 'good' or 'evil' by their hair colourRalph is blond, Jack is a redhead, and Roger's hair is dark. Ralph is the most civilised of all the boys, while Jack and Roger are more quickly lost into savagery. However, Simon was dark-haired, at least in the book, but this still follows color symbolism. Black doesn't just represent evil. It represents death, foreshadowing his eventual demise. He is a Christ figure, after all.
  • In The Magician's Nephew: The magic rings. Uncle Andrew believes that the yellow rings are for the "outward" journey from our world, and the green rings are "homeward"; but it turns out that yellow is for entering the Wood Between the Worlds, and the green for leaving the Wood.
  • In the Malazan Book of the Fallen, the three Tiste peoples are easily distinguishable by their skin and hair colours. The Tiste Andii are midnight-black skinned and either black or white haired (with the occasional reddish-brown haired individual). The Tiste Liosan are porcelain-white skinned and have hair in shades of blond, gold and silver. And the Tiste Edur are grey skinned, with hair in shades of brown.
  • In Malediction Trilogy trolls of pure blood always have very pale skin and black hair. The more human blood a half-blood troll has, the darker their skin and the lighter their hair.
  • In Our Bloody Pearl, sirens are generally referred to by color upon first meeting.
  • Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The neckties and inside lining of Kimberly student uniforms are color-coded in the novel art to identify the student's grade year: first-year students wear red, second-years wear green, third-years wear orange, fourth-years wear purple, seventh-years wear black.
  • The Reynard Cycle: In Calvaria, you can instantly determine anyone's general profession and rank in society based entirely on the color of their clothing:
    • Children, and people of the service class, wear white.
    • Artisans, engineers, and laborers wear tan.
    • Members of the military wear gray. Non-Calvarians sometimes refer to all Calvarians as "the Grays" due to the fact that they've never seen one who wasn't a soldier of some kind.
    • The blood-guard (Calvaria's State Sec) wear black trimmed with red.
    • The Judges (the law makers and arbiters of justice) wear red trimmed with black.
  • Crimson of his titular series and The Future is Crimson, the spinoffs to Ro.Te.O. He's a Phantom Thief in the former, a resurrected guy in the latter, hence why he doesn't fit under Color Character.
  • The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge. The planet of Cliaand is completely militarized and every person on it has a uniform with a color appropriate to their job.
  • Lampshaded by Diana Wynne Jones in The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, wherein she explains that a Genre Savvy character can always identify which characters are (or will turn out) good, evil, traitorous, possessing magical powers, or lost royal heirs upon first meeting them by the colour of their hair or eyes (or combination thereof).
  • According to The Truce at Bakura, in Star Wars Legends both Rebel and Imperial sensor displays show friendly units as green and hostiles (confirmed or potential) as red. In this book specifically, when the Rebels arrive at Bakura to rescue the Imperial-held planet from a third party attack all local units are in red until the Imperials accept their help and their units are switched to green, and the Empire turning on the Rebels as soon as the invaders retreat is marked by their units switching back to red.
  • Uniform color and the colored trim of capes and such are used to identify rank in the Tsorian military in Under Alien Sky. Traditionally the offspring of military personal wear a similar outfit of the same color, since they share the rank and privilege as the parent they choose to raise them.
  • Villains by Necessity: Played straight and subverted. Sam wears black, Mizzamir wears white. The subversion lies in that Mizzamir is a deluded wizard who only cares about Light and Dark, not right or wrong. Sam is an assassin, but other than that quite a decent fellow.
    • Sam also notes that assassins take this to the logical extreme of wearing black undergarments, the better not to give away one's position if one's outer garments tear on an assignment and, as he puts it, "show a white bunny tail." At the start of the book, Sam has also had his naturally blond hair dyed black for the same reason.
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: In the original book, the land of Oz is divided into coloured areas: the Emerald city's main color is green, Munchkinland is blue, Gillikin is purple, the land of the Winkies is yellow, and Quadling country is red. The first paragraphs of the book describe Kansas as an unforgiving prairie, where the sun and the wind make the houses, the fields and the grass gray, and so gray are uncle Henry and aunt Emma, who never laughed. The only exception to the dreariness is Dorothy's dog Toto, who is also shiny black.
  • In The Zodiac Series, each House is associated with a color, which serves to identify Zodai—who wear suits in their House's colors—and generally serves as a secondary indicator of who's from where.
    • Aries: Red
    • Taurus: Olive
    • Gemini: Orange
    • Cancer: Blue
    • Leo: Violet
    • Virgo: Emerald
    • Libra: Yellow
    • Scorpio: Black
    • Sagittarius: Lavender
    • Capricorn: Brown
    • Aquarius: Aqua
    • Pisces: Silver
    • Ophiuchus: White

    Live-Action TV 
  • Awake (2012): Has two realities, with the tone of the camera distinguishing them for the audience and a colored wristband distinguishing them for the protagonist.
  • Breaking Bad gets a lot of mileage out of this trope, to the point that the wiki even has a page on it. Skyler usually wears blue, reflecting her morality and loyalty and her eventual sadness in the resulting tragedy. Jesse is yellow, reflecting his optimism and cowardice, as well as his status as the show's eventual moral center. Walt wears green, putting him between them and reflecting his greed and envy, and later starts wearing black as he starts Jumping Off the Slippery Slope. Hank wears red and orange, showing off his angry demeanor and putting him in opposition to Walt. Marie always wears purple, putting her opposite Jesse and a number of other characters who wear yellow involved in the meth trade. Walt's meth is always referred to as sky-blue, implying its purity. The list goes on.
  • Bridgerton:
    • The Bridgertons wear - and decorate their house in - shades of pale blue, reflecting their generally well-bred and good-natured reputation:
      • Anthony is frequently in darker navy and black to show his angst and inner turmoil.
      • Benedict goes for brighter blue or combines it with other colours as a budding bohemian.
      • Colin is always in lighter blues, fitting his innocent outlook.
      • Daphne wears blue pastels evolving to pale purple following her ascension to married Duchess.
      • Eloise frequently appears in mint green, as she's more on edge of the family and doesn't fit into her role as well.
    • The Featheringtons, in contrast, wear garish greens, yellow and oranges together showing their lack of class and family unity. Penelope often wears just yellow, matching her sweeter nature.
    • Simon is almost exclusively in bold colors, particularly red or black, because of his brooding, Byronic Hero characterisation.
    • Marina normally wears pink, emphasizing her attractiveness and femininity.
    • Siena wears red, as she's more sexual and less sheltered than the high-born ladies.
    • Lady Danbury is frequently in purple, highlighting her authority and feared reputation. She also occasionally wears red, reflecting her fierce and sassy personality.
    • Among the Sharmas, Kate often wears teal and/or purple, reflecting her assertive and bold traits, while Edwina prefers pink or peach, signifying her sweet and ladylike nature. This also foreshadows that it is Kate not Edwina, who is a match for Anthony, as teal and purple fit much better with the Bridgteron blue colour scheme than pink and peach.
  • Charmed (1998):
    • Played for Laughs briefly, when Paige in Season 5 tries to colour-code the pages of the Book of Shadows with sticky tabs for more efficient research. Piper is not amused.
      Piper: [ranting] "Beings of evil are red, creatures of good are white." Oh, yeah? Well, what's a Bunyip? Because it's not good or evil, so what the hell color is that? [finds the page with a red and white tab] Oh. Well that's confusing.
    • In the season one episode "Which Prue Is It Anyway?", Phoebe tries to color-coordinate a trio of Prues (Real Prue = black sweater, Clone 1 = pink sweater, Clone 2 = blue sweater).
  • Clue: The main cast members usually wear something of their piece's color.
  • Community: In an episode parodying Brave New World, students of Greendale start wearing color-coordinated outfits based on their social status, as determined by their rating on a social networking app.
  • Criminal Minds: There is an in-universe example in the episode "Magnificent Light". The bad guy is a man suffering from synesthesia, a neurological condition where two different senses are experienced at the same time. He can actually see the words as they are spoken by someone else and the colors in which these words appear to him indicate if the person is good, evil or even a liar. In his case, white means good, red means evil and orange means deception.
  • The Defenders (2017):
    • Red and black are the primary colors of The Hand, best seen in their ninja outfits, which are black with red inner-lining (and the inverse for some members, like Nobu). One way to tell if someone who seems like a good guy might come into play in the Hand's schemes is to look at their costumes for these colors.
      • Daredevil (2015): The color scheme of Elektra's main fight outfit is black with red highlights, and foreshadows the reveal that she is a Black Sky, the ultimate weapon of The Hand. In The Defenders, she sports an all-red version of her comics costume.
      • Iron Fist (2017): A viewer who's already seen Daredevil will catch on that Bakuto's compound is another faction of the Hand right away, as he and most of his students wear the Hand's colors in red shirts, black pants and black leather jackets.
    • Within the first few episodes of the show, there's a different color motif for each main character: reds underline all of Matt Murdock's scenes, blues and purples are the primary colors in Jessica Jones (2015)' scenes, golds and yellows are the primary colors in Luke Cage (2016)'s scenes, green is the primary color of Danny Rand's scenes, while white is the color that underlines all of Alexandra's scenes.
    • The logo for the Royal Dragon has red, green, yellow and blue, the colors of all four Defenders, and symbolizes the first place where the four of them work together as a team. The blue even briefly disappears from the sign when Jessica briefly deserts the team.
  • Daredevil (2015): In a non-Hand example, even when Matt Murdock isn't in his Daredevil suit, the red and black colors of the suit follow him around in his civilian life as he always wears blood-red glasses, and sometimes red-black colored neckties.
    • Season 3 episode 10 "Karen" sees Matt have to fight Dex in his church, which is completely bathed in red lighting.
  • Degrassi: Community School introduces uniforms in Season 10 of the eponymous show, color-coded by year (Grade 12-blue, 11-red, 10-purple, 9-yellow). This holds the next year, apparently for the viewers' convenience — in a real school, it would make more sense for the rising students to keep their present colors with blue rotated to the incoming freshmen.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Because the TARDIS is blue, that colour is often associated with the Doctor, especially Ten, who wore a blue suit as often as his brown one and whose sonic screwdriver had a blue light. Thirteen wears even more blue than Ten.
    • The Fourth Doctor's coat would change depending on the "genre" of the particular serial. The yellow-brownish one was more for adventure, red for action, and grey for horror or mystery.
    • In the Fifth Doctor's first season, the boys are in yellow and the girls are in purple.
    • As the Seventh Doctor was growing Darker and Edgier, his coat was changed from a light whitish colour to dark brown.
    • Since the Ninth Doctor, the Time Vortex is blue if the TARDIS is going backwards in time, and red if it is going forward.
    • The Eleventh Doctor's bowtie was red if the episode took place in the future, and blue if it was in the past. Also, his coat, much like the Seventh Doctor, became a much darker brown after the events of "The Angels Take Manhattan".
    • The Daleks have been traditionally colour-coded according to their positions in the Dalek hierarchy: The armour of leadership-level Daleks was usually distinguished by black, gold or chrome markings, with the Supreme usually being predominantly black in color. The Emperor's Guard typically had black domes, while Dalek Sec — the leader of a secret order known as the Cult of Skaro — had an entirely black casing. In "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", the Supreme Dalek was red. In 2010's "Victory of the Daleks", a new hierarchy was introduced:
      • Scientist — orange
      • Strategist — blue (later a darker, metallic navy)
      • Eternal — yellow
      • Supreme — white
      • Drone — red (later a darker, metallic burgundy)
    However, the "New Dalek Paradigm" met with much fan ridicule, to the degree that bright candy-coloured Daleks — which were initially intended to forevermore replace the old — never became the norm. When next Daleks needed to be a major threat, a few of the New Paradigm Daleks were sitting in back as a Continuity Nod (in an episode where many Dalek variants, some going back to The '60s, cameoed) and out of the way of the plot, and most Daleks looked like they have for most of the revived series; later appearances have consisted entirely of the usual Daleks (which are bronze-coloured). The next time a Supreme Dalek was seen, in "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar", it was the older red model instead of Paradigm white.
  • Fringe: The opening credits distinguish which universe the episode is in. Blue=main universe, red=parallel universe, amber= rebooted and connected universe.
    • This is how the universes came to be called the "blue-verse" or "red-verse" by fans.
    • Gray signified time jump episodes.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • The families are colour-coded by hair. The Lannisters are blond, the Baratheons are black-haired, the Targaryens are platinum and pale because they're very descended from Valyrians, the Greyjoys are light brown-haired and the Tullys are auburn-haired. This is a blessing to the viewer trying to keep track of the many characters, where the politics between families is the main theme. This also actually plays a part in the plot considering hair color isn't the only thing being passed down. Gendry's hair color is decidedly Baratheon Black. It's what clued Ned in to him being one of Robert's many bastards, and later (collectively with all the other bastards) clued Ned in to Joffrey not being Robert's at all.
    • Soldiers' uniforms: Stark troops wear grey and brown, Lannisters wear black, red and gold, Baratheons wear light brown and orange, Arryns wear light blue, Greyjoys wear dark Cambridge blue, Martells wear orange and cream, and Wildlings wear grey.
    • Invoked by the Night's Watch and the Kingsguard, who wear black and white respectively in place of heraldry to signify their renunciation of any prior allegiance.
  • Grey's Anatomy uses this extensivly, denoting place of work, job, and seniorty through color.
    • Grey Sloan Memorial:
      • Sky Blue: Surgical interns and residents, scrub nurses.
      • Navy Blue: Surgical attendings and fellows.
      • Brown: ER residents
      • Pink: OB/GYN
      • Green: Nurses
      • Beige: Psych
    • The "If/Then"'s Alternate Universe version of Seattle Grace:
      • Dark Grey: Attendings
      • Light Grey: Residents
    • Mercy West Medical Center: Orange or Grey.
    • Seattle Presbyterian Hospital: Red.
    • Mayo Clinic:
      • Dark green: Doctors
      • Purple: Nurses
  • Iron Chef: The Iron Chefs are easily identifiable by their unique uniforms compared to the customary chef whites: Ishinabe in Green, Michiba in blue, Sakai in red, Chen in yellow, Nakamura in purple, Morimoto in silver. Kobe actually still has a lot of white in his, but it's accented by green and red. Funnily enough, the windscreen on floor reporter Shinichiro Ohta's microphone tends to match the Iron Chef in battle that day (and in one battle where Michiba and Chen tag teamed, the windscreen was green, what one gets when blue and yellow are mixed).
  • Kamen Rider OOO has all of the Greeed habitually dress in their own Core Medal color when in human guise. This also applies to OOO himself when he gets the purple Core Medals shoved into his chest and is seemingly compelled to switch to wearing a purple shirt, which he immediately stops wearing when he gets them out.
  • Lady Dynamite takes place in three time periods, so to keep it from being confusing, each time shift has a title card and a different colour treatment; The Present looks normal, The Past is totally oversaturated and cartoony and Duluth is washed out and blue to reflect the sadness of that period.
  • Merlin: Merlin and Arthur usually wear blue and red respectively, as a near-literal example of Red Oni, Blue Oni. Spirited Young Lady and Rebellious Princess Morgana wears bright, jewel-like colours such as reds, blues, purples, and greens, whilst the gentler Shrinking Violet Guinevere wears almost every shade of pastel imaginable: lavender, peach, pink, and baby blue. By series four, the bad guys (Morgana, Agravaine, Helios, and Shade!Lancelot) wear black, whilst those with magical powers are usually delinated by the colour green, particularly Mordred and the other Druids, who wear green cloaks.
  • Orange Is the New Black:
    • Orange uniforms mark new inmates, who then switch to khaki after being assigned a bunk.
    • In Max, B block wears salmon, C block wears navy blue, and D remains in khaki.
    • FCI Ohio inmates wear dark green.
    • ICE in Season 7 generally wear orange, with anyone who committed a felony wearing red.
  • Ordinary Joe starts with the main character's graduation and shows that he has a choice of who to spend the weekend with afterward. Whatever he chooses changes his life and we see the consequences of all three choices ten years later. To differentiate between the timelines, a different color is prominent:
    • If he goes away with his best friend, he later marries her and becomes a nurse at a local hospital. These scenes are predomininently green.
    • If he goes away with his mother and family, he stays single and becomes a police officer. Appropriately, these scenes are predomininently blue.
    • If he goes away with the girl he just met, he marries her and becomes a rock star. These scenes are predominently red or orange.
  • Person of Interest: The Machine's view uses symbols to sort what it (and the audience) is seeing. White brackets indicate a person being scanned and/or monitored, and they lose the bracket when the Machine decides they're not relevant to current investigations; white brackets with red corners and cardinal marks indicate an irrelevant threat with lethal intent; yellow brackets designate individuals who are aware of the Machine's existence (i.e. Finch, Reese, Nathan); solid red brackets indicate relevant threats or threats to the Machine; blue brackets indicate government operatives assigned to deal with relevant threats; white diamonds are boats; green triangles are planes; and a black bracket with yellow corners and cardinal markers indicate an individual designated as an 'analog interface' — someone capable of communicating with the Machine directly.
  • Power Rangers: Every Power Ranger will always wear at least one item in their Ranger color. It was most egregious in the original series, where no one seemed to own anything that wasn't in their Ranger color. Former Rangers will usually dress in neutrals like black, gray or brown. Family members or love interests of specific Rangers will also often dress in their relevant Ranger's color. Every now and then, you'll get a side character, like Emily in Zeo, who dresses exclusively in orange.
    • It's been lampshaded a couple of times. In Power Rangers: Dino Thunder, when Tommy becomes the Black Ranger, he mentions that he's got to go shopping — there is a distinct lack of black in his closet. In Power Rangers S.P.D., whenever Bridge, the Green Ranger, uses his Psychic Powers, which are not part of his Ranger powers, the effect is green. In a later team-up episode, it's revealed that he is now Red. His psychic aura has also somehow become red.
    • Surprisingly averted with Karon in Power Rangers Lost Galaxy. Even after becoming the Pink Rangers, she continued to dress in mostly black clothes.
  • Quantico: At the FBI Academy, FBI Agent trainees wear light blue long-sleeve shirts, while analyst trainees wear dark blue polo shirts. The agents are also given bright red plastic guns to wear on their hips around school instead of actual matte-black firearms.
  • Red Dwarf: During Series VI, Rimmer becomes able to switch between soft-light (intangible) or hard-light (solid) mode. You can tell which he currently is because his soft-light outfit is red and his hard-light outfit is blue.
  • Revolution: The explosive-filled log in "Soul Train" is made of considerably darker wood than the other logs in the pile. Overlaps with an Inverted Trope (in live action) of 2D Visuals, 3D Effects.
  • Scrubs: The medical doctors wear blue scrubs and the surgeons wear green. Nurses most often wear pink or purple and orderlies are in maroon.
  • Sesame Street: In the late '80s, Random House's compilation cassettes were colored green. That changed in the early '90s, when Random House's duplicator, Rank Video Services America, experimented with disposable cassettes which were colored green, and so the Sesame tapes went back to black to avoid confusion.
  • Sons of Anarchy: While it's not prominent, the gangs display their own colours. Samcro wears a lot of blue, Mayans have green, and the One-Niners purple.
  • Stargate Atlantis: Uniforms are colour coded in a similar manner to Star Trek. Sciences are in blue, medical are in yellow, command is in red, and military are in black.
  • Star Trek:
    • In the original series, the Starfleet uniform colors for the different divisions were Command Yellow, Science Blue, and Operations Red. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, though, Command and Operations switched colors.
    • On TNG, Cadets wore a variation on the standard uniform, but with the colors reversed: division-colored shoulderpads on black jumpsuits. This later became the attire of "lower deck" drones who labored within space stations and other departments; no glamorous Galaxy-class explorers, they. Cadet uniforms are usually grey, although they too underwent changes.
    • In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, while all Starfleet officers wore the same red uniform, they wore undershirts in differing colors signifying which division they belonged to: Command (white), Science (gray), Operations (gold), Medical (light green), and and Trainees/Cadets (red). The later TOS movies added Security (dark green) and Special Services (light blue) to the mix.
    • Also for many of the major races and nations, who are associated with particular colour schemes:
      • The Federation is a rich blue (on star charts, on their seal, in their warp plasma) supplemented by other light pastel shades and grey (for ship bulkheads).
      • The Klingons are red (on star charts, on their banner, their graphic displays and ship controls, their warp plasma, their transporter effect). They also prefer red lighting aboard their ships and in their buildings.
      • Romulans are deep green (on star charts, on banners and display graphics, their warp plasma, their transporter effect). Their ships also have a deep green hull colour.
      • Interestingly Romulans have green blood (copper-based). This means the ships are blood colored.
      • Cardassians are usually yellow-ochre or pink (both colours were used for their weapons — pink in their first few appearances, later yellow, their transporter is yellow-ochre, on star charts they're either yellow or pink). Their ship hulls are ochre. Their graphics and display panels use orange/beige and green, colours that sometimes appear on their cultural emblem.
      • The Dominion is purple (their warp plasma, on star charts; their graphics are purple and green).
      • Ferengi warp plasma and ship hulls are orange.
      • Andorians, to no-one's surprise, like white and blue, along with ivory.
      • The Borg favours black and a sickly green.
      • Bajorans uses gold-tan and dark red.
  • Stranger Things: Chief Hopper's police uniform is tan, whereas the other officers in Hawkins Police Department wear blue shirts and black pants.
  • The Untamed: The main five clans mostly have the same colours as the novel (white for Gusu Lan, purple for Yunmeng Jiang and gold for Lanling Jin), though Qinghe Nie is now dark gray instead of dark green and Qishan Wen is now red and black instead of white and red.
  • Utopia (2014): Parodied in one episode when Brendan keeps colour-coding reports with barely-distinguishable variants of the same colour (e.g, using purple, lilac, mauve and turquoise in one report), oblivious to how inconvenient it is for his coworkers.
  • The Wheel of Time (2021): Aes Sedai wear clothes of the color of their respective Ajahnote  as well as colored stones in their rings. Accordingly, the White Tower graduates, who did not become Aes Sedai, wear rings without stones. In the books wearing the Ajah color was common, but never obligatory. And rings had no stones.

    Music 
  • This is somewhat common in Japanese Idol Girl Groups in general (guys, not so much), with the notable exception of the supergroups (like AKB48) since there aren't enough easily distinguishable colors for that many members at one time.
  • Morning Musume has this as one of its primary gimmicks, and its members often become strongly associated with their color. No two girls ever have the same color at once, though some colors may be very similar (e.g. during the 15th generation, "Bright Green" and "Emerald Green" were both in use). Alhough rare, some girls have changed their color during their tenure if one they favor more opens up following a graduation.
    • Other Hello! Project groups also use color-coding. More often than not, if a girl is in Morning Musume and a sister-group or subgroup, the colors she has for either group will be completely different.
  • Momoiro Clover Z, following MM's example, has different colors for each member and match to their gimmicks. For them, it's an intentional nod to Super Sentai – the leader wears red.note  This was such a big factor (out of many) to their success that their management company began assigning color-coding to all their other main idol acts to various levels of consistency and success.
  • When they were first starting out and still very much Junior-Idols, Perfume had this – A~chan was Pink, Kashiyuka was Blue, and Nocchi was Green. Prior to their major debut, they switched to using clothing and hair styles to distinguish themselves, which has been their trademark ever since.
  • During the first two eras of Ladybaby, Rie Kaneko and Rei Kuromiya's costumes often did this – Rie's had blue and Rei's had pink.
  • For its first 2+ years of existence, PassCode wore different-colored shirts. Although the gimmick was dropped by the end of 2015, the remaining members are still associated with their colors unofficially, for instance when receiving flowers for their birthdays.
    • Yuri Kurohara (2013-2015) was Red
    • Nao Minami (2013–) is Rose
    • Kaede Takashima (2014–) is Yellow
    • Yuna Imada (2014–) is Blue
    • Hinako Ogami (2015–) is Purple
  • Japanese all-girl rock band SCANDAL used to be colour-coded quite often. This has dropped off since the STANDARD album (2013) was released, however. Seen here.
    • HARUNA: Red
    • TOMOMI: Yellow
    • MAMI: Green
    • RINA: Blue
  • K-pop group Rainbow has seven members, each corresponding to one of the colors of the rainbow.
  • Melina KB: In "Ex-Girlfriend", the shirts worn by the characters at the race track are very indicative of their final placement. Melina's besties wear black because they are not actually competing for Melina's boyfriend's affection (hence why they get derailed early on) but as moral support. Melina has a shiny silver shirt and the ex-girlfriend sports a golden one. They respectively earn the silver and gold medals despite Melina's best efforts. This reflects Melina's feelings of inadequacy when compared to her boyfriend's ex.
  • Supertramp's Album Crime of the Century has this. The lyrics sheet is color-coded for each of the two singers. Roger Hodgson is white, and Rick Davies is yellow.
  • When RCA Victor introduced the 7" record in 1949, they used translucent vinyl of various colors (plus opaque black) for each of the musical genres they sold. This color-coding was abandoned in favor of using only black vinyl within a few years. The colors and their corresponding genres were as follows:
  • During the early days of the Compact Disc, Warner Music Group adopted a label design known as the "target" CD, which was called that because it consisted of a crosshair pattern on what was usually a solid paint backdrop. While variations exist, the color of the crosshair and the background usually depended on the label:
    • Asylum Records - purple crosshair, light blue background, later changed to a blue crosshair on a yellow background
    • Atco Records - green crosshair, pink background
    • Atlantic Records - red crosshair, teal background
    • Cotillion Records - black crosshair, purple background
    • Elektra Records - silver crosshair, red background
    • Elektra Musician Records - silver crosshair, pink background
    • Esperanza Records - black crosshair, pink background
    • Finnadar Records - red crosshair, blue background
    • Geffen Records - black crosshair, silver background
    • Island Records - green crosshair, purple background
    • Mirage Records - dark blue crosshair, light blue background
    • Nonesuch Records - black crosshair, bronze background
    • Qwest Records - dark blue crosshair, blue background
    • Real Records - red crosshair, purple background
    • Rolling Stones Records - red crosshair, yellow background
    • Sire Records - purple crosshair, yellow background
    • Solar Records - silver crosshair, purple backbround
    • Warner (Bros.) Records - red crosshair, silver background
    • WEA Records - purple crosshair, teal background
  • Each of the Wiggles wear different colors so that people can tell them apart easier. Gregnote  dresses in yellow, Jeffnote  dresses in purple, Murraynote  dresses in red, and Anthony dresses in blue.
  • Tally Hall members have color-coded ties. In Welcome To Tally Hall they actually call each other by their tie colors instead of their names. Here’s a list:
    • Joe Hawley is Red
    • Rob Cantor is Yellow
    • Andrew Horowitz is Green
    • Zubin Sedghi is Blue
    • Ross Federman is Grey
    • Bora Caraca, the "unofficial sixth band member" is Orange
    • Purple is reserved for the fans of the band.
  • Each of Taylor Swift's albums have been color-coded by fans based on the cover artwork and she later adopted it for marketing as well
    • Self Titled - green (after the green butterflies and greenish tint on the cover)
    • Fearless - yellow/gold (her bright blonde hair on the OG)
    • Speak Now - purple (the dress which in reality was red but was photo-shopped purple)
    • RED - red (her red lips but also the title of the album)
    • 1989 - light blue (after the seagull/sky motif of her sweater)
    • reputation - black (newsprint style cover)
    • Lover - pink (pink/blue sky)
    • folklore - gray (grayscale cover art)
    • evermore - brown/orange (based on the coat she's wearing, orange is also the color assigned to the theorized lost album, Karma)
    • Midnights - dark blue (from the title and her blue eyeshadow)
    • TTPD - white (the bedsheets, assigned by Taylor herself in the announcement)

    Myths & Legends 
  • If an animal is important and doesn't have extra features (Pegasus, Sleipnir, Cerberus), it will most often be a certain color. White is a particularly strong giveaway, as many cultures believe that white animals have magical properties.
    • In Judaism, the "red heifer" is a pure-red cow ("red" as in normal color for some cows, not Amazing Technicolor Wildlife, though even two hairs of another color invalidates it) that is vital for a certain purification ritual.

    Pinball 
  • Alien (2017):
    • Each of the three kinds of modes are given their own color: green for Alien, blue for Aliens, and red for multiballs.
    • During "Find the Acid," shots the player is intended to make are colored blue, while "acid" shots that will eventually cause them to fail the mode are colored green.
    • During "Find Jonesy," the player is required to shoot for orange-colored shots (correlating to Jonesy's fur color) while avoiding blue-colored ones.
  • Banzai Run: The targets for the racers correspond to their own colors and names.
  • The Beatles color-codes its five main modes: "All My Loving" is blue, "Drive My Car" is red, "I Should Have Known Better" is purple, "Ticket to Ride" is light blue, and "It Won't Be Long" is yellow.
  • In Foo Fighters (2023), it's possible to upgrade certain parts of the band's van several times. The playfield light uses different colors to show how many times each section has been upgraded — in order, yellow, lime, green, cyan, blue, purple, and finally red.
  • FunHouse: Rudy's Nightmare: "Haunted Roller Coaster" requires the player to follow green-colored arrows on the display. Red-colored ones prematurely end the mode instead.
  • Game of Thrones features LED lights that change color to match the current situation, such as turning the playfield green during Blackwater Multiball or white for "Winter Is Here". In regular play, the lighting will change colors according to which Houses have been gathered by the player.
  • Godzilla (Stern): During Godzilla Multiball, shots are colored according to their current jackpot level. Regular jackpots are blue, double jackpots are green, triple jackpots are yellow, and the super jackpot is red.
  • Guns N' Roses (Jersey Jack):
    • The seven band members each have their own color on the playfield and display: Dizzy Reed is purple, Richard Fortus is dark blue, Duff McKagan is yellow, Axl Rose is red, Slash is orange, Frank Ferrer is green, and Melissa Reese is light blue.
    • During "Shall We Play a Game?", positive shots flash red, white, and blue (representing America), while negative shots flash red and yellow (representing China).
  • Heist!: Each member of the crew has a color assigned to indicate their roles and relevant targets to shoot during gameplay. Maggie Machado is blue, Katherine Burgess is green, Willie Burnett is yellow, Franklin Cooper is purple, Leonid Myshkin is orange, and Liz Sterling is red.
  • Indiana Jones (Stern) uses different colors for each of the four films: Last Crusade is blue, Temple of Doom is red/orange, Raiders of the Lost Ark is yellow, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is green.
  • Indianapolis 500 uses orange, yellow, blue, and green to distinguish between the four main shots, assigning an opposing racer and a set of game modes to each color.
  • James Bond 007 (Stern): The playfield lights persistently use the same colour to indicate characters and gadgets from a specific movie. Dr. No is yellow, From Russia with Love is red, Goldfinger is gold, Thunderball is orange, You Only Live Twice is green, and Diamonds Are Forever is blue.
  • Led Zeppelin indicates the status of the Icarus Multiplier through the colors of the four band members' symbols on the playfield. They start at brown before steadily moving into cooler colors (up to magenta, between 5.6 and 5.9x) as they increase, ultimately resetting back at 6x.
  • The Mandalorian:
    • The center of the playfield groups the three primary objectives by color: Missions are yellow, Encounters are red, and the Razor Crest multiball modes are green.
    • During an Encounter, every light on the upper playfield will momentarily flash to indicate whether the right target was hit: green for a hit, red for a miss.
  • The Munsters indicates different levels of scoring with different colored inserts — they start at white, then go to blue and top out at red.
  • RoboCop: RoboCop's Prime Directives are colored red, green, and yellow, and completing each directive allows the player to arrest the corresponding criminal.
  • Rush (2022): All six of the planet modes highlight relevant shots with a specific color - "Working Man" is orange, "La Villa Strangiato" is purple, "The Spirit of Radio" is blue, "Tom Sawyer" is cyan, "Limelight" is (fittingly) lime, and "The Big Money" is pink. This also impacts another game mechanic: getting records of the same color before starting the mode will double or triple the relevant shot's scoring while it's running.
  • Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! (2023): Miner 49er's mode requires the player to crack open a safe by shooting four shots in a specific pattern. Green arrows mark the right shot, while red arrows indicate an incorrect one.
  • In Stern's Spider-Man table, the villains' targets and indicators are color-coded — green for the Green Goblin, yellow for Sandman, dark blue for Venom, and red for Dr. Octopus.
  • Sega Pinball's Starship Troopers uses different colors to identify the various Bugs that need to be destroyed on each planet — yellow for Warriors, blue for Plasma Bugs, green for Hoppers, and red for Tankers.
  • In Transformers, the various characters and indicators are color-coded for the corresponding factions, using "Decepticon violet" and "Autobot crimson". The playfield is thematically divided into two color-coded halves, and the "Combo" Limited Edition version has each half of the cabinet similarly colored.
  • Total Nuclear Annihilation allows stacking ball saver levels, indicating how many are reserved with a flashing light of a specific color — red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and finally purple — on the appropriate lane.
  • Toy Story 4 (2022): During Buzz's version of the Wizard Mode, the third phase requires you to make shots flashing red and yellow while avoiding shots rapidly flashing red and blue ("cop shots").

    Print Media 

    Podcasts 
  • Cool Kids Table:
    • The Ryutama system used in Small Magic asks that each character have a hero colour. Stege is brown, Maggie is green, and Janus is blue.
    • Along with character class, colour is the other part of the Splat in Josh's "Super Mario RPG' system and determines the Status Effects that a character can do in . Red is fire (burn), green is lightning (shrink), pink is love (sleep), yellow is sand (dizzy), purple is shadow (fear), light blue is ice (freeze), and regular blue is star (silence). For the game Here We Gooooo! itself, Dario is yellow, Yoshi is green, and Crania is purple.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • All Japan Pro Wrestling: The Four Pillars in the 1990s each had a signature color: Mitsuharu Misawa was Green, Kenta Kobashi was Orange, Toshiaki Kawada was Yellow, and Taue was Red. Jun Akiyama would later take on Blue.
  • WWE Raw is the red show, and WWE SmackDown is the blue show.
    • As of 2016, the titles are also color-coded with either the faceplate or leather of the belt matching its show's respective color.
  • The "poison mist" used by many wrestlers, especially in Japan. According to Japanese Kayfabe, only certain wrestlers can do it because they have a special gland that allows them to produce the mist. Most wrestlers can produce only certain colors of mist, and each has its own effects: The most common, the green mist, blinds the opponent, the red mist both blinds and burns, the blue mist puts the opponent to sleep, the yellow mist paralyzes, and The Dreaded black mist is a career ender.
  • CHIKARA's Xyberhawx 2000: Sylverhawk was silver, Razerhawk is gold, Nytehawk is dark purplish-blue, and Danjerhawk is crimson.
  • CHIKARA's The Nouveau Aesthetic: Edith Surreal has red on her mask, Ursa Minor in the Night Sky had blue on his.

    Tabletop Games 
  • BattleTech: This is in effect on a general scale, insofar as the Inner Sphere is considered. The "accepted" color pattern for the five great houses is Davion yellow, Kurita red, Steiner blue, Marik purple, and Liao green. Comstar possessed no planets beyond Earth, but were associated with the color white. Later additions to the map, such as the Free Rasalhague Republic and the St. Ives Compact, appear in a shade of teal and a sort of yellow-green, respectively. When the six invading Clans appeared in the Inner Sphere, color variants became necessary. Clans Smoke Jaguar and Steel Viper received dark and light shades of gray, respectively. Clan Wolf space was denoted in brown, and Clan Ghost Bear in white. Clan Jade Falcon, naturally, received a brilliant green, where Clan Nova Cat was shown in black. While these were the 'stereotypical' colors, this did not always apply to the units from those particular factions, however.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • This is a particular endemic trait for dragons. It's especially notable among the chromatic dragons, each of which is named after the specific color of its scales, which at a glance gives a lot of information about the specific powers and weaknesses of the creature.
      • For the longest time, one could easily distinguish between good and evil dragons by whether or not they were metallic and shiny (good) or vividly monochromatic (evil). This was eliminated in 4th edition, and then brought back in 5th, though it still gives an idea of whether or not a dragon is more likely to be more "social" or more predatory.
      • Played with as early as "Basic" D&D, in which dragons still had distinct alignments by color but whites and blues are neutral, and where a later boxed set introduces more powerful similar-looking but always differently-aligned "gemstone" dragons in a rather obvious attempt to mess with expectations. (This incarnation also has only one "metallic" dragon type — gold (lawful), with its chaotic gemstone counterpart being amber).
    • One of the most characteristic traits of the ooze, pudding and jelly family of Blob Monsters is that its branches come in numerous color-coded variants, each with very specific traits, strengths and weaknesses. During a dungeon delve, being able to quickly recognize the sometimes very specific shade of the slimy mess that's bubbling up through the floor and which list of traits it's associated with is often a matter of life or death — if it's black, it will dissolve everything that's not stone; if it's brown, it will dissolve anything organic but leave metal alone; if it's gray, it's the other way around; if it's green, it will turn you into more of itself but cold and fire will kill it; if it's olive, it will turn you into a zombie first; if it's mustard, It Can Think; and so on and so forth.
    • Common flumphs are albinos, while the rarer, spellcasting monastic flumphs are yellow.
  • In Hanabi, each suit is a different color: blue, red, white, yellow, and green. Only like colored cards can be placed together. Additionally, there's a sixth suit where the numbers/fireworks pictured are a rainbow of colors. How those are used depends on which advanced variant of the game is being played
  • Pathfinder:
    • Chromatic and metallic dragons use the same color-coding as in D&D — gold dragons are lawful, benevolent and protective, silvers are righteous crusaders, bronzes are introspective scholars, brasses are gregarious socialites, coppers are heroic but flighty, whites are animalistic brutes, blacks are violent sadists, greens are scholastic and regimented, blues are cunning manipulators and reds are monstrous engines of destruction.
    • Cave worms — monstrous, burrowing worms found in the depths of the world's global cave system — are divided into a number of specialized types distinguished by color. Besides the "basic" purple worm, there are the aquatic azure worm, the crimson worm found in volcanic caverns, the white worms that burrow within glaciers and the grey worms that lurk in necropoles and boneyards.
    • Boilborn — pustule-like oozes spawned in areas where many creatures die of disease, comes in several varieties mostly distinguished by color. Common boilborn are red, plagueborn are sickly yellow, blindborn are greenish-gray and slightly luminescent, abyssal boilborn are a mix of bruised blue and bloody red, and infernal boilborn are black.
  • GURPS Infinite Worlds, lists being entirely white as one of the signs that an animal may be a parachronozoid (in-world jargon for "naturally capable of moving between worlds"), based on the folkloric convention of white animals having magical properties.
  • In Must Be Tuesday, character sheets are adorned with a slider, one half red, the other blue. A character on the red end of the slider is well accustomed to the events of a mundane life, while a character on the blue end dabbles in the supernatural. Going too far in either direction is not fun.
  • In Mystery Date (1965) the different outfit cards are coordinated by color. So the formal dance outfit has pink cards, and the winter sports outfit has blue cards.
  • New Horizon: In a meta example, the game requires two differently colored twenty-sided dice. The rulebook labels them White and Black; you can only get criticals on the black dice.
  • Paranoia:
    • Alpha Complex is colour coded for your inconvenience. It's almost certain that to get anywhere interesting, you'll have to cross an area outside your colour clearance. (Paint is strictly rationed and outside your clearance.)
    • Downplayed in Alpha State, where all comrades are Red (but some are more Red than others).
  • Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution
    • All of the medical and psionically active drugs fall into this trope. If the play remembers their color combinations and shades, they'll be able to identify them consistently.
    • The book itself switches off between red, blue, and green color schemes, but the sections on pisonic talents are color-coded to the talent trees. Telekinetic talents are blue, pyrokinetic talents are red, and psychokinetic talents are green.
  • In board games, using color to distinguish sides is so pervasive that it's easier to note exceptions. For instance, in shogi, the pieces of the two sides are identical and distinguished by which way they're pointing.
  • The categories in Trivial Pursuit, depending on what card set you're using.
  • Warhammer: In Storm of Magic, it's mentioned that the various kinds of dragons can be told apart by the color of their scales — fire dragons are red, black dragons are, well, black, frost dragons are icy white, forest dragons are green, and storm dragons are blue. This also ties into the magical affinities of their respective Emperor forms — doomfire dragons always wield the Lore of Fire, nightmare dragons the Lore of Death, ice dragons the Lore of Light, vemom dragons the Lore of Life, and great storm dragons the Lore of Heavens.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • Rather than use the traditional symbols ascribed by the Codex Astartes for squad designation, the Blood Angels Chapter of Adeptus Astartes use a system of colour-coded helmets with red representing battleline units, yellow for close support, blue for fire support and gold for veterans.
    • The orks belive different colors have different effects on their vehicles, and thanks to the way their psychic powers work, they do. Most famously, Red Ones Go Faster, while black is touch, blue is lucky, etc. Fanon adds orange and purple as making things extra sneaky (have you ever seen an ork painted purple and orange? Of course not, that's how sneaky they are).
  • Wingspan:
    • The types of bird powers are colour coded, which makes it easier to scan your board for relevant powers in various situations: Brown powers are activated whenever you activate the bird's habitat, pink powers can only trigger between your turns, teal powers only activate at the end of rounds, and yellow powers only activate at the end of the game. Birds with a plain white card can be ignored, as these are either Vanilla Units or have a power that only activates when they're placed (effectively making them vanillas after that point).
    • Each food type has its own colour, which makes them easier to tell apart at first glance.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!: Each of the monsters in the Qliphort Archetype has a Colored Sphere (Red/Pink, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Black, Gray, White, and two-tone). Each of these spheres are cased on the card frames (two-tone referencing pendulum, yellow for normal monsters, etc.) and they are all found on the Sephirot structure. These spheres were the Ball Joints of El-Shaddoll Grysta which were attracted to the structure as seen in Saqlifice.

    Theatre 
  • In Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto, the main characters' university is split into student groups based on their countries. The Florentines wear blue, the French wear orange, and the Spanish wear black, not as an in-universe rule, but as a visual element.
  • Extensive in Chess. For example, in the 2008 concert production, Soviets and emigres wear black, Westerners wear white, loose cannons wear both. In that show,
    • Anatoly starts out wearing a black suit and off-black shirt. He defects towards the end of Act I, and in Act II he wears a dark grey suit with white shirt.
    • Freddie wears pure white throughout, but the show makes much of him being the archetypal American — 'naked unprovoked Yankee aggression', as Florence puts it during "Press Conference". He's loyal to the US by being loyal to himself.
    • Florence wears black in the first act, because she's an emigre. She takes off her black jacket late in Act I. In Act II she wears a white dress, symbolising her alignment with defector Anatoly, who has become more white himself; however, the dress has a large black logogram on it, symbolising her increasing commitment to achieving her own ends.
    • Svetlana wears pure black throughout. She's Soviet, but not an active Soviet agent like many of those wearing black. She is, however, a tool of the Soviet Union throughout, and powerless to resist that.
    • Walter wears black in the first act, where he functions only as a European anchor and executive for Global Television, playing up Anatoly's niceness and Freddie's bad-boy status — "loyal" to the Soviet Union. In the second act, however, his role as a CIA officer is more obvious, and he switches to American white — but with a flash of pink and a subdued gold tie, pointing up the self-interest which is demonstrated by his easy, friendly cooperation with Molokov — they ultimately want the same things.
    • Molokov wears black throughout, but with a white shirt and red tie. He's loyal to his country, but as "The Soviet Machine" demonstrates, he sees the whole scenario as an opportunity to gain standing and influence in the KGB.
    • The Arbiter wears black and white all show, but is also always prominently wearing blue, a colour not associated with either faction. He is self-interested, but also disinterested — unaligned, effectively without class or creed. The colour coding is further assisted by the fact that the Arbiter is President of FIDE — he is the highest official of world chess. He may be self-interested, but his "self" effectively is chess.
  • In Duke Bluebeard's Castle, each of the seven doors has a mood-appropriate color as it's opened and fills the halls. The torture chamber has red light, the armory is yellowish-red, the treasury is golden, the garden is bluish-green, the tracts of land are bright white and blue, the sixth door's pool of tears decreases the amount of light, and the seventh and final door where the wives are kept is silver.
  • In Hamilton, Hamilton goes through a few color changes throughout the show, he is first seen as one of the ensemble members wearing white at first then switching to brown as a student, then joining Washington's army wearing blue and once he's a statesman he switches to green then as he gets older, he wears black until the duel. Other characters tend to wear white to indicate that they are dead, too — in the finale, Jefferson and Madison wear white when they are done speaking to indicate they have died.
    • Also the Schuyler sisters: Angelica wears pink, Eliza blue, and Peggy yellow.
  • The ballet adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream (using the incidental music of Felix Mendelssohn) usually have similar costume designs in contrasting colours for the two mortal couples, to help the audience to keep track of all the changes in affection in the absence of spoken dialogue. George Balanchine's ballet (NYC Ballet's 2017 production) has Hermia and Lysander as the "blue couple" and Helena and Demetrius as the "red couple", while in Frederick Ashton's ballet adaptation titled "The Dream" (American Ballet Theatre production) it's the other way round.
  • In modern productions of Romeo and Juliet, members of each of the houses wear colored outfits to help identify to which house they belong. Capulets are traditionally in red, Montagues in blue, and the Prince's house in earth tones, yellow, or purple.

    Toys 
  • Starriors: The two factions of Starriors adhere to the following color schemes: blue/white/silver/beige for Protectors, black/red/purple/gold for Destructors.

    Video Games 
  • This is a common feature of team-based games. As exemplified by Red vs. Blue, multiplayer games divide players between two or more teams with each having the same color, usually red and blue, so they don't have to waste time making unique and easily distinguishable models. It also occurs in real-time strategy games, each player will have their own color to differentiate their units, often otherwise identical to those of other players, shown with that color. In the single-player modes of such strategy games, the player is often shown in blue and the enemy in red, unless the color is otherwise significant.
  • The 64 Layers Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Prestige: Light pink
    • Qrestige: Teal
    • Zrestige: Burnt sienna
    • Bananas: Yellow
  • Afterimage: The equippable Treasurescope of Se Afterimage indicates the currently-acquired and total number of collectibes within a given biome. If you've already found every valuable item in that area, its numbers will be colored bright green; otherwise, it will be pale yellow.
  • Antichamber: The color of the blocks used in any given room hint at the gun required to solve that puzzle.
  • Antreematter Dimensions: Each layer has its own color.
    • Antimatter: Dark red
    • Booster: Blue
    • Galaxy: Light purple
    • Infinity: Orange
    • C1 (Challenge 1 only): Black
    • Decrementy (Challenge 9 only): Grey
  • Ao Oni: The titular oni's bright bluish-purple colour means you will spot it the second it enters the room. Unless it's dark...
  • Ammo in Apex Legends is color-coded like this: light ammo is orange, heavy ammo is aqua green, shotgun shells are red, sniper ammo is purplish blue, energy ammo is lime green, arrows are yellow, and supply drop ammo (separate from normal ammo and can't be replenished) and throwing knives are magenta.
  • In APICO, each bee species and its corresponding hive has a different color, but since some of them look similar, you can turn on labels to help identify them more easily.
  • In Arc Style: Baseball!! 3D, some teams have all or nearly all their players sport a certain hair color, even wacky ones: blue for the Mackerels, purple for Rhinos and red for Mammoths.
  • Assassin's Creed uses this trope extensively. In all games, the Eagle Vision paints allied characters blue, enemies as red and targets as yellow. In addition, each faction wears clearly distinctive colors so you can tell them apart at a glance. This applies to their minimap icons as well, when it's relevant.
    • Assassin's Creed III: The British wear redcoats while the Colonials wear blue.
    • Assassins Creed IV: The British wear red once again, the Spanish wear yellow, while the briefly seen Portuguese forces wear blue.
    • Assassin's Creed Rogue: The British are red, the French are blue and the Assassins are orange.
    • Assassin's Creed: Odyssey: The Spartans are red, the Athenians are blue (this even goes for the clothes of NPCs), and Cultist soldiers are Purple.
  • The Atomic Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Energy: Yellow
    • Protons: Blue
    • Electrons: Red
    • Neutrons: Gray
    • Atoms: Green
    • Resons: Pink
  • Bayonetta: The three realms in the Trinity of Realities each have a dominant color scheme their inhabitants are often surrounded by:
  • In Beecarbonize, the Industry Sector is red, the Ecosystems Sector is green, the People Sector is yellow, while the Science Sector is blue.
  • In BEMANI games, difficulty levels are almost always color-coded.
    • beatmania IIDX: Beginner (Green), Normal (Blue), Hyper (Yellow), Another (Red), Black Another
    • DanceDanceRevolution:note  Beginner (Blue), Basic (Yellow), Difficult (Red), Expert (Green), Challenge (Purple)
    • GITADORA: Basic (Blue), Advanced (Yellow), Extreme (Red), Master (Purple)
    • jubeat: Basic (Green), Advanced (Yellow), Extreme (Red)
    • Popn M Usic: Easy (Blue), Normal (Green), Hyper (Yellow), EX (Red)
    • REFLEC BEAT: Basic (Green), Medium (Yellow), Hard (Red)
    • SOUND VOLTEX: Novice (Blue), Advanced (Yellow), Exhaust (Red), Infinite (Green)
  • The Binding of Isaac has "Champion" enemies, which are bigger, stronger, more resistant, and have special abilities depending on their color.
  • BioShock and its sequel:
    • A traffic light color scheme is used for the security turrets, bots, and cameras: red ones are hostile and green ones have been hacked to be on your side. The lights on the Big Daddies' suits' portholes are similar: yellow light means it's neutral, green means it's hypnotized, and red means it's hostile.
    • BioShock 2's multiplayer, curiously enough, changes this to red, white, and blue to indicate if a turret is hostile, inactive (the default state until someone hacks it), or on your side. Vending machines gain a light as well to hint as to whether they've been booby-trapped.
    • Ammo types are also differentiated mainly by different colors on their packaging; in Minerva's Den this extends to the physical color of the laser cells when you have your laser equipped. In the case of the chemical tanks, the specific colors are also meaningful: red for napalm, blue for liquid nitrogen, yellow for electric gel.
  • BlazBlue: The color of a super flash indicates what kind of move your opponent is about to unleash:
  • The Borderlands Series: Used as a way for Notice This: Anything that can be interacted with (chests, switches, quest items) has a green light or aura. Considering Pandora is a barren wasteland for the most part, greenery really stands out. While the sequels are much more colorful, brightly colored chests still stand out.
    • The weapons and equipables like shields have Color-Coded Item Tiers and follow the mnemonic "When Grandma burps, Patrick obeys": White, Green, Blue, Purple, Orange. White and Green are the average grade (white being useless garbage quickly), Blue being better than them and sometimes being one of a kind items, Purple being better than better, and Orange being legendary items.
      • Borderlands 2 adds a few more ranks with Magenta being for the new "E-tech" weapons, weapons that use what was learned from Eridian technology, and Cyan for "Pearlesent" weapons in New Game Plus. Captain Scarlet and her Pirate Booty adds Pink for its Seraph items, which are powerful but controlled by their drawbacks or gimmicks.
      • Finally, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel! removes Magenta and Cyan and changes Pink to "Glitch weapons" in the "Claptastic" Voyage DLC
  • Buckshot Roulette: In a Russian Roulette game played with a shotgun, live rounds are red, while blanks are blue-grey.
  • Bureaucracy, all villains and obstacles will be denoted by whatever you told the game your least favourite colour is.
  • The Burning Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Ashes: Shadow
    • Coal: Gray
    • Electricity: Yellow
  • cactus and Mr. Podunkian's game Dungeon uses a simple system for its Retraux graphics. The player, the walls, and all harmless decor are white. Deadly objects and enemies are red. In the last room, you come upon a bloody dagger... and since blood is red, it kills you as soon as you touch it, which is the game's "proper" ending.
  • Chalk: The game's enemies in have to be color-coded, as each type has a vastly different way of defeating it. It also serves as a hint system for bosses, who need to be fought the same way as normal enemies of the same color.
  • The Christmas Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Elves: Mint
    • Present machines: Brown
    • Trees: Rose
    • Toys: Cream
  • Cellophane overlays in the arcade version of Circus gave each row of balloons a different color. This also provided a handy key to the scoring: each blue balloon on the top row was worth twice as many points as a green balloon from the middle row and five times as many as a yellow balloon from the bottom row.
  • Collection of Everything: In addition to the icons, each layer also has a specific color to identify it.
    • Laboratory: Pink (white at first)
    • Bamboo: Light green
    • Mushrooms: Brown
    • Wood: Slightly lighter brown
    • Wheat: Yellow
    • Meat: Red
    • Stone: Grey
  • The Communitree: Each layer has its own color, though their nodes may combine several colors.
    • Jacorb: Purple
    • Aarex: Ivory
    • Acamaeda: Camo
    • thefinaluptake: Periwinkle
    • Despacit: Mint
  • The Compact Tree: Each layer has a different color, though they also have different pattern to help them stand out.
    • Condense: Blue-Gray
    • Vapour: Blue
    • Compact: Copper
    • Superdense: Black
  • Crash Team Racing: Crash's kart is blue, while Cortex is red, Coco is pink, N. Gin is violet, Tiny and Oxide are green, Dingodile is olive, Polar is aqua, Pura is indigo, Ripper Roo is orange, Papu Papu is yellow, Komodo Joe is mustard, Pinstripe is black, Fake Crash is slate, N. Tropy is cyan, and Penta is white. Likewise, in Crash Nitro Kart, Team Bandicoot's karts are blue and white, Team Cortex is red and gold, Team Oxide is yellow and green, Team Trance is green, and Velo and his champions' hoverbikes are purple with bits of red, blue, and gold.
  • In Creepy Castle, the boss Moody's gimmick is that his color will dictate his attack. Attacking him while he's red will trigger a nasty counterattack.
  • In Crystal Story, weapons with stats that are geared towards magic have blue text, while weapons with stats geared towards melee have red text.
  • All parryable objects in Cuphead are colored a bright neon pink to make them noticeable at a glance and avoid players running into bullets while trying a parry.
  • With the player trapped in a world of darkness, Dark Echo runs off this. Your footsteps and the echoes they make show up in white. Hostiles are red. Water Is Blue. Trapdoors and switches are yellow, and their waves return a different kind of sound. The end of each level is rendered in thicker white lines.
  • In Deadfall Adventures, shootable targets and buttons are shiny gold, light-activated switches are blue, and the three types of treasure are coloured differently (gold, silver and eerie blue) depending on which stat they upgrade.
  • Deltarune: The flying damage numbers that appear when FIGHTing an enemy are color-coded to each of the party members. Kris' are blue, Susie's are pink, Ralsei's are green and Noelle's are yellow.
  • Despacit Tree Δ : Each layer has its own color.
    • Prestige: Teal
    • Boosters: Dark blue
    • Generators: Dark green
    • Tachyon: Blue
    • Enhance: Purple
    • Replicators: Lime
    • Ascension: Light yellow
    • Stadium: Pink
  • Donkey Kong:
    • Donkey Kong 64 was practically built around this idea. If anything important pertained to a certain character, one simply had to look at the color to figure out to whom the task belongs. For Donkey Kong, it was yellow; there was red for Diddy, blue for Lanky, purple for Tiny, and green for Chunky.
    • Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze: In addition to the red balloons, you can go to Funky's shop to buy the green balloon from the Nintendo 3DS port of Donkey Kong Country Returns and a brand new blue balloon that extends your Oxygen Meter. DK Barrels also change color to indicate which Kong is within.
  • The three protagonists of each Dragon Age game so far have had a distinct color associated with them: blue, as in Warden blue, for the Warden. Red, which both is used frequently for the Amells and Kirkwall, for the Champion. Green, which primarily is the color of the Anchor and Fade, for the Inquisitor. Inadvertently this means they make a Chromatic Arrangement.
  • Dungeons 2 uses different colors to distinguish the three playable factions: Green for The Horde, Purple for Demons and Blue for the Undead. The sequel, Dungeons 3 has rooms and units divided by color: neutral rooms are Yellow, Horde rooms are Green, Undead Rooms are Light Blue/Cyan, Demon Rooms are Purple and Fallen Heroes are Red.
  • Dwarf Fortress features dwarves that are different colors depending on their jobs, the result in your main meeting room being a mess of brown, white, grey, blue, etc. smiley faces.
  • The Dynas Tree: Each layer has a specific color.
    • Coins: Yellow
    • Workers: White
    • Workfinders: Dark grey
    • Banks: Bright green
    • Managers: Light blue
    • Builders: Light yellow
    • Spiritual power: Pink
    • Territories: Turquoise
    • Soldiers: Dark green
    • Wisdom: Blue
    • Singularity: Black
  • Endless Sky: All the human weapons are color-coded for easy recognition, and their shooting animations, ammo and related equipment all have the matching color as well.
    • Amongst the projectile weapons, gatling guns are brown, energy blasters are blue, plasma cannons are purple, proton guns are red, and particle cannons are yellow.
    • When it comes to beam weapons, standard beam lasers are red, heavy lasers are green and electron beams are blue.
    • For missiles, javelins are blue, meteors are red, sidewinders are yellow, and heavy rockets are green.
  • In Ensemble Stars!, the different units tend to be associated with one or two particular colours, though it's more of a guideline and there is some overlap:
    • Trickstar is red and blue; as both of these are common colours they are sometimes associated with orange, from Subaru's hair
    • fine is white and gold
    • UNNDEAD is black and purple
    • Knights is navy blue, as well as black and white due to their chess motif
    • Ra*bits is white and light blue, the colours of a sailor uniform
    • 2wink is bright blue and pink
    • AKATSUKI is red and black
    • Valkyrie is maroon
    • Switch is lime green and white
    • MaM is brown
    • Ryuuseitai is the one outlier — as a Sentai themed unit each member is naturally associated with their own colour (red, blue, green, yellow, and black), so as a whole they tend to be associated with multicolour rainbows.
  • Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth: In the Bonus Dungeon Empyreal Bridge, there are wave-like teleporters that can take one from their current position in the stratum to another. These teleporters are unique because the destination will not only depend on the side from which the person approaches the teleporter, but also on the color of the luminous energy of the teleporter itself. Blue teleporters take the user to a spot placed five spaces forward (again, the spot in question is also determined by the direction the user approached the teleporter from), orange ones take them to a spot placed 10 spaces forward, green ones 20 and purple ones 30. In case the destination would theoretically be placed beyond the boundaries of the current floor, the player will either Wrap Around to a spot placed in the map's opposite side (if the warp's trace goes west or east), reach a lower floor (if the trace goes south), or reach a higher one (if the trace goes north).
  • In Evolve all the hunters are color-coded by class. Red is Assault, Green is Trapper, Blue is Medic, and Yellow is Support. On the monster's side, each monster has a distinctive armor glow: Goliath is red, Kraken is blue, Wraith is white-pink, behemoth is orange, and Gorgon is pale green. Overall, the monsters are identified by an orange dot when viewing the map in replays.
  • The Factoree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Extractor: Dark lilac
    • Furnace: Dark gray
    • Manufacturer: Maroon
    • Plastic: Gray
    • Monopoly: Aquamarine
    • Power station: Yellow
    • Research: Blue
  • Falling Mountain's AlterPrestige: Each layer has its own color.
Each layer has its own color.
  • Nano: Light blue
  • Broken Nano: Violet
  • Broken Nano Capital: Dark blue
  • Broken Nano Communal: Aqua
  • Micro: Dark green
  • Broken Micro: Snowy mint
  • Broken Micro Enlargement: Mint
  • Mini: White
  • Small: Dark cerulean
  • Partial: Peach
  • In order to make this Fantasy Strike more accessible to beginners, a lot of more obscure Fighting Game mechanics such as invincibility frames and frame advantage are color-coded:
    • A character flashing white is invulnerable, so you can't hit them at all.
    • A character flashing blue has Super Armor. You can hit them, but their attack will still happen.
    • The visual effect for blocking an attack changes color depending on who will recover first:
      • A blue flash means the attacker will recover first and can defend against a counter-attack or launch a second attack.
      • A yellow flash means both players will recover at the same time.
      • A red flash means the defender will recover first and can launch a counter attack.
  • FE000000: Normally buttons for tabs are gray, but some of them are colored to make them more noticeable. You can make them duller, use redshift or blueshift options, or turn them off entirely.
    • Main and Autobuyers: Yellow (pink if redshifted, cyan if blueshifted)
    • Anything related to Infinity: Magenta (cyan if redshifted, yellow if blueshifted)
    • Anything related to Eternity: Cyan (yellow if redshifted, magenta if blueshifted)
    • Studies: Green (red if redshifted, dark blue if blueshifted)
    • Eternity Producer: Lavender (snowy mint if redshifted, salmon if blueshifted)
    • Chroma: Orange
    • Anything related to Complexity: Maroon (blueberry if redshifted, sage if blueshifted)
    • Powers and Galaxies: Most of the previous colors
    • Anything related to Finality: Gold
  • Fate/Grand Order:
    • The three card types used for combat are green (Quick), blue (Arts) and red (Buster).
    • The Saint Graph Rarities are divided by color as well. 1* and 2* cards are bronze, 3* cards are silver, and 4* and 5* cards are gold. If you use Palingenesis on low-rarity Servants, the borders and backs of their cards can change to showcase that their current level cap matches that of higher rarity. The sole 0* Servant has a black border and back and they never change colors even with the Palingenesis.
      • If you summon a gold Servant, the orbs within the summoning circle can glow golden to indicate that you're summoning one. If the orbs glow in rainbow colors, it's guaranteed to be a 5* Servant. However, the orbs don't have to glow in either color when you summon a 4* or 5* Servant.
    • Whether you get a common drop or a rare drop can be seen with the color of the chests. Brown chests give you useless drops, silver chests give you common to uncommon drops, while red chests with golden outlines give you rare drops.
    • The colors of the Chaldea uniforms are gender-coded. White or green uniforms are for men, and orange uniforms are for women.
  • 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand: ammo pickups are colour-coded based on the weapon type — blue ammo is for close-range weapons, yellow is for machine guns, and red is for special weapons like snipers and rocket launchers. The enemies you fight are also colour-coded in this way to tell you what kind of weapons they're equipped with.
  • Final Fantasy X: Arguably, the stark contrast between Tidus (light hair, dark skin, heavy use of yellow and black in his clothing) and Yuna (dark hair, light skin, heavy use of white and blue in her clothing) represents the stark differences between the two. Additionally, each character is represented by a specific color on the Sphere Grid. Tidus is light blue, Yuna is white, Wakka is yellow, Lulu is purple, Kimahri is dark blue, Auron is red, and Rikku is green.
  • Final Fantasy Tactics has the player party and enemy party (for humans/humanoid characters anyway) colored differently from each other so you can tell who was friendly and who was a foe; generic friendly characters are usually colored in blue and green clothing while enemy unites usually wear clothing in red and purple. The color coding concept carries on to the sequel as well.
  • Fire Emblem: Your units have blue outfits, your enemies have red outfits, and neutral characters have green outfits. Especially noticeable when an enemy defects to your side mid-battle, whereupon they change clothes. Yellow is a wild card; in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War it represents neutral units beholden to no faction, in Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance and Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn it represents partners you can give indirect orders to, and in Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Fire Emblem Warriors it represents a second faction of enemies hostile to both you and the red guys.
    • In Fire Emblem Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, all playable characters have unique color palettes even when they reclass (except into the DLC Overclasses, which consist of the same uniforms for everyone). For instance, the cleric Silque has a deep blue color scheme across all her classes. This is her in her base class compared with her promoted class, Saint and then Cavalier, the last of which she can only access through the DLC-locked Villager's Pitchfork. However, characters' map sprites are still depicted with their respective factions (blue for player characters, red for enemies, and green for computer-controlled allies).
  • flOw: Enemies change color based on their state: a white enemy creature is unwounded or calm, a blue one is wounded, and an orange one is attacking.
  • In Forza Motorsport 4, the cars each AI driver drives are the same colour, when a car's colour can be chosen.
    • For instance, M. Rossi's cars are [almost] always red, as close to Rossa Corsa as possible.
  • Frosty Nights: The four boy-eating Snowlems are distinguished from each other by the colour of their clothing. There's Jolly Red, Fat Blue, Crazy Green, and Yellow.
  • The Fuel Tree: While there are no layer nodes which would be colored, the buttons for tabs inside them do have colors.
    • Energy: Yellow
    • Batteries: Dark yellow
    • Resources: Brown
  • When the Game Boy Color was released outside of Japan, games that could be run in both monochrome as well as color were indicated by a black casing (not counting some Pokémon games), as opposed to the grey ones from up until then.
  • The Game Dev Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Updates: Green
    • Experience: Red
    • Cash: Orange
    • Refactors: Blue
    • School: Brown
    • Fame: Pink
    • API: Avocado
    • Time flux: Purple
    • Diplomas: Indigo
    • Lectures: Teal
    • Good will: Forest
  • The Gaokao Tree: Each layer has a specific color.
    • Gaokao: White
    • Chinese: Red
    • Math: Yellow
    • English: Green
    • Integrated Science: Cyan
    • Permanent Upgrades: Grey
    • Cash: Olive
    • University: Shadow
  • Gears of War: The COGs tend to have blue lights on their armor and the Locusts red.
  • The elements in Genshin Impact have a specific color to distinguish themselves from each other. Some of the playable characters wear clothing that bear the color of the element they use, but in some cases, their hair and/or eye color do the same.
    • Anemo: Turquoise
    • Geo: Yellow
    • Electro: Purple
    • Dendro: Green
    • Hydro: Blue
    • Pyro: Red
    • Cryo: Cyan
  • Ghost Trick, the colour of the ghost world varies from ghost to ghost. With Sissel, it's red, with Missile, it's green, and with Yomiel, it's blue.
  • Grapple Dog: All of the spots that Pablo's grappling hook can latch onto is noticeably blue-colored.
  • Grand Theft Auto 2: With so many rival gangs to tell apart, they now have to wear bright clothes. You will also meet a few NPCs dressed in lime green or red: the former likes to jack cars, much like the roving punks in Grand Theft Auto III. The chap in red will approach you, shout "GIMMIEYOURMONEY" and run off in the opposite direction with your cash.
  • This became more of an essential gameplay mechanic in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas to make gang members easy to tell apart from civilians especially in a tense gang war. The Johnsons' own gang—the Grove Street Families—are dressed in green, the Ballas in bright purple, the Vagos in yellow, the Varrios Los Aztecas in turquoise, and so on.
  • Grand Theft Auto V: Franklin is represented by green, while Michael is blue and Trevor is orange.
  • Grim Dawn: each of the many classes has its own distinctive color:
    • The Soldier is Yellow.
    • The Demolitionist is Red.
    • The Nightblade is Purple.
    • The Arcanist is Teal.
    • The Shaman is Light Blue.
    • The Occultist is Violet.
    • The Inquisitor is Blue.
    • The Necromancer is Aqua.
    • The Oathkeeper is Orange.
  • Growing Up: Among the Attributes, Intelligence is blue, Empathy is red, Physique is green, Memory is yellow, Imagination is purple, while Charm is pink.
  • Gruntz: Your gruntz are orange. Enemy gruntz cover a wide palette, each color denoting a different behaviour.
  • Guild Wars color-codes everything. Professions are color coded, and skills for that profession have icons of predominantly that color, and the bosses of that profession have an aura of that color, and so on. PvP and the factions in Factions use the classic red vs blue setup. In some PvP maps, they even color-code the objectives to group them!
  • In Hard Reset, the explosive things are colored orange, while parts of the environment that form large electrical arcs when shot are labelled cyan.
  • In hets, the player character is blue, and so is the Man in the Cave and the helping fairies you can get from him. Enemies are all red, the projectiles you and some enemies fire are either green or turquoise, the portals are white, and the statues can be of other colours, like yellow or purple. All of these will also cast off halos of their colour, and change colour themselves if they're under a different halo (i.e. enemies will go pink in the portal's white glow, and purple inside your own.
  • The h0nde Tree: The nodes have these colors:
    • h0nde: Dark blue (formerly green)
    • Prestige: Turquoise
    • Twitter: Blue
  • The Incremental Dev Tree: Downplayed as some layers are recognisable by their colors and the icons for them, but many of them also use different colors for menus.
  • The Incrementali Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Research: Green
    • Singularity: Grey
    • Galaxy: Yellow
    • Portals: Light blue
    • Environments: Blue
    • Shrine: Beige
    • Cult: Red
  • Infinite Softcaps: Each layer has an identifying color.
    • Matter: Blue
    • Antimatter: Magenta
    • Infinity: White
  • I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Among the workplaces, the Garrison is red, the Expeditions Outpost is orange, the Living Quarters are yellow, Geoponics is green, Command is blue, while Engineering is purple. The associated colonists working there are color-coded accordingly: Anemone and Vace at the Garrison, Dys at Expeditions, Tammy at the Living Quarters, Cal at Geoponics, Marz and Rex at Command, and Tang and Nomi at Engineering.
  • Jak and Daxter has five different types of Eco that are thematically connected through all games made by Naughty Dog, until Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier broke the trend:
    • Green Eco always represents health and grabbing it will heal Jak or his vehicle.
    • Red Eco is associated with substantial increase of melee power. In first game it amplifies the power of short-range attacks and sligtly increases their range. In second and third game its ammo is used by Scatter Gun and its modifications, which fittingly fall into shotgun or limited area-of-effect variety. In Combat Racing it provides rear weapons, which usually drop static objects such as mines with, again, limited range, or grants defensive buffs.
    • Yellow Eco is associated with ranged attacks. Grabbing it in first game would make Jak throw fire balls. Yellow ammo in second and third game is used by weapons with longest range such as the Blaster. In X grabbing it will give you front weapon, which usually have substantial range.
    • Blue Eco represents the energy of motion. In first game channeling Blue Eco would make Jak move faster as well as activate machinery and enable to use special launcher pads. Second and third game give blue ammo to weapons with fastest fire rate, notably Vulcan Fury. In X it is essentially a nitro.
    • Dark Eco is the most destructive of all. In first game it cannot be used at all and is only present in Dark Eco boxes (which hurt Jak on contact) and Dark Eco pools (which kill him outright). Second and third game allow Jak to channel it, which grants him super-destructive moves. The strongest weapons such as The Peacemaker also use purple ammo. In X it's obtained by damaging yourself or killing enemies and getting enough boosts power of front and rear weapons. Also, from second game it's used as a power source, akin to nuclear power.
  • John Wick Hex: Pretty much every important object on the screen is highlighted in white, be it bullet trails or bodies of the enemies and their weapons when highlighted through an overhead obstacle. However, the stats of the living enemies are written in black on their pinkish info boxes that pop up when you pause time. Likewise, the full segments of your ammo and health counters are white, whereas the emptied ones are pink.
  • Kessen II: Once again, Shu's officers dress in Green, but Wei and Wu switched. Wei officers in this game wear Red and Wu's army dress in Blue.
  • The Legend of Spyro: In the last two games, the different kinds of spirit gems are distinguished by color — red ones restore health, green ones restore mana, purple ones fill up the Fury meter and blue ones give experience points.
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Both games for the NES (The Legend of Zelda and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link) have the golden shelled cartridge instead of grey cartridge like most NES games, and the box art has a hole to show gamers that cartridge is gold. Aditionally, red is used for things that favor Link, while blue favors his enemies. Most of the upgraded items are red, and special items like the Power Bracelet are also red. Weaker enemies are red, while stronger ones are blue. The first two dungeons are colored blue, and there are no red dungeons. Finally, Ganon himself is colored blue, but the ashes shown after his death are red.
    • The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past:
      • The armor of the enemy soldiers as well as Link himself is green for the weakest form, blue for the stronger version, and red for the even stronger version.
      • This also corresponds the the ascending order of rupee values. Green is worth 1, blue is worth 5, and red is worth 20.
      • As well as the pendants you collect from the Light World dungeons to get the Master Sword.
      • Healing potions are red, mana potions are green, and blue potions heal both.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has certain colors corresponding to Locations, Elements, Races etc. that are all aligned.
    • In Hyrule Warriors, blue troops are allies, red are enemies, and yellow are "rogue" (either unaligned or a second enemy force, depending on the map). The map markings are also based on opacity rather than hue: small troops are nigh-transparent blips on the map, troops led by a minor officer as more solid dots, and Captains as a solid dot with a border.
    • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: Guardians with magenta Tron Lines are infected by Ganon's corruptive Malice, while those with orange lines are uncorrupted and still act according to their programming. However, orange Guardians they will still attack Link as a part of his tests, ultimately making no functional difference from their corrupted counterparts unless you have the Master Sword, which deals extra damage to corrupted Guardians but regular damage to the uncorrupted ones.
  • LEGO Dimensions: Year one figures have cyan Toy Tags, while year two figures have orange.
  • The Leveling Tree gives each layer its own color.
    • XP: Green
    • Gold: Yellow
    • Loot: Blue
    • Rubies: Red
    • Quests: Purple
    • Skills: Orange
    • Treasures: White
    • Damage: Dark red
  • Lies of P: The game's elemental damage, as well as which enemies and weapons deal which elemental damage can be easily understood by color. Damage of said element will have its font color changed from white to said color.
    • Fire: Orange
    • Electric: Bright Blue
    • Acid/Decay: Petrol Blue
    • Disruption: Bright Yellow
  • In Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom, each of majin’s powers corresponds to a colour: yellow for lightning, blue for wind and orange for fire. Feeding it fruits of these colours will permanently increase the power of these abilities. Conversely, enemies that block elemental powers with their shield have a gemstone of a corresponding colour included in the centre of the shield.
  • Manifold Garden: Each of the six gravity directions are associated with a color, shared by all objects that interact with that particular direction.
  • Super Mario Bros.:
    • Mario Party Advance: In the minigame Boo-Bye, a solo player has to lure Boos into paintings that match their color: Blue, white and pink. The character earns points as they do this, and upon them being hit by any Boo the minigame ends. in Shroom City mode, the player has to achieve a certain score without being hit to win.
    • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story has several bosses and minigames where Mario and Luigi can each only deal with half of the threats — for instance, a scrolling shooter-style minigame where each of the things to be shot can only be shot by a specific brother. Mario and Luigi wear red and green, respectively, so whatever Mario targets is red and whatever Luigi targets is green. This also extends to menus, interfaces and such — Mario has red, Luigi has green and Bowser has orange.
  • Inside the main Mass Effect series, the Paragon and Renegage moralities are associated with blue and red, respectively. It is especially shown with endings of the games of the main series, with the colour motif of the chosen morality being displayed in it. Green has always represented the Prothean species and artifacts series-wide.
    • In Mass Effect 2, the merc groups are distinguished from one another by their armor color and the races of its members: the Blue Suns have blue armor and are staffed by humans, turians, and batarians; the Blood Pack has red armor and consists of krogan and vorcha; and Eclipse uses yellow armor worn by humans, salarians, and asari.
    • Likewise, the life bars are color-coded: purple for biotic barriers, blue for tech shields, yellow for armor, red for health.
    • Cerberus' logos and vehicles often possess an orange color scheme, while as of the third game, the Systems Alliance is represented by a blue one, likely to contrast with Cerberus. The Normandy SR-2 gets recolored as such between the games when it comes into the Alliance's possession from Cerberus, as do many of the Alliance variants of ships seen previously used by Cerberus in the second game (such as the Kodiak shuttle). Even the menus switch from blue, to orange, to blue again throughout to the trilogy to represent whatever faction Shepard is working for at the time.
    • In Mass Effect 3, you may get a red, green, or blue ending.
  • The name bar for each character in Melody has a different color.
  • In Mercenary Kings, the elemental versions of enemies and bosses are color-coded. Incendiary ones have orange-shaded uniforms, caustic ones have purplish or greenish tinge, electric is yellow and cryogenic is icy-blue.
  • Metroid:
    • Doors are color-coded based on what weapon the player needs to shoot them with to open them; the standard colors are blue for any weapon, red for missile doors (except in Metroid Prime, where missile doors are gray and red doors use the Plasma Beam), green for super missile doors, and yellow for power bomb doors. The exceptions are Metroid II (the game is totally monochrome) and Metroid Fusion (colored doors work on a security-level system, and open to any weapon once you have the clearance for them).
    • In Super Metroid, the different beams are color-coded: The Power/Charge beam is orange, the Spazer is yellow, the Ice beam is blue, Wave beam purple, and Plasma beam green. The Hyper Beam cycles through the entire rainbow.
    • The different weapons in Metroid Prime: Hunters and everything associated with them are color-coded: Samus's missiles are brown, Sylux's Shock Coil is blue, Spire's Magmaul is orange, Kanden's Volt Driver is yellow, Noxus's Judicator is purple, Weavel's Battlehammer is green, and Trace's Imperialist is red. An exception is made regarding the Omega Cannon: It's associated with white, but so are doors associated with the standard Power Beam.
  • The Milestone Tree: Each layer can be identified thanks to its color.
    • Milestones: Dark purple
    • Prestige: Grey
    • Super-prestige: Blueish gray
    • Meta-milestones: Purple
    • Prestige boost: Turquoise
    • Hyper-prestige: Cyan
    • Atomic-prestige: Aqua
    • Transcend: Yellow
    • Hyper boost: Mint
    • Prestige energy: Orange
    • Super energy: Amber
    • Extra-milestone: Lavender
  • In Mini Motorways, different buildings are colored based on their use as well as their occupancy. One of the game's main aspects is to build roadways so that traffic can easily move to and from buildings based on their activity.
  • Monster Prom has its player characters—Oz, Amira, Brian, and Vicky—represented by the following colors.
    • The shy and timid fear-monster that is Oz is represented by the color yellow.
    • Hotheaded redhead Amira, and ifrit, is understandably represented by the color red.
    • The deadpan yet chill Brian the Zombie is represented by the color green.
    • And friendly, [[Adorkable dorky]] Vicky, a Frankensteinean monster is represented by the color blue.
  • The Multitree: All layers have colors correspond to them. They're all carried over from the original games. There are also two layers of sorts which have their own colors, pink for the Donation button and white for the Tree Manager.
  • Musaic Box: Each color represents a different music instrument. Two pieces of the same color can't be put in the same column.
  • The six interests in MySims are color-coded: Cute is pink, Tasty is orange, Fun is yellow, Studious is green, Geeky is blue, and Spooky is purple.
  • Need for Speed 2015 has different neighborhoods use different street light hues.
  • This is how Nintendo DS and Nintendo 3DS game cards are differentiated: DS cards are dark gray, DS cards with infrared sensors (used for Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver, Pokémon Black and White, and Pokémon Black 2 and White 2) are black, DSi cards are white, and 3DS cards are light grey.
  • The Nintendo GameCube had three colors for their memory cards, each one indicating the maximum storage capacity: gray cards could store up to 59 blocks (4 Mbit) of memory, black cards could store up to 251 blocks (16 Mbit), and white cards could store a whopping 1019 blocks (64 Mbit) at most.
  • Nobody Saves the World: Enemy wards make them immune to all damage except the type that matches the ward: sharp (green), blunt (brown), light (yellow), or dark (purple); being hit by the same type will break the ward and make them vulnerable to other types of damage. When an enemy has a ward, they have a coloured icon over their head denoting the type of ward, and this is also reflected in the enemy's overall color palette.
  • In no-one has to die., the plot unfolds entirely through the chatlogs, and each character has a color to match their handle. Steve is Mint, Christina is Scarlet, Troy is Silver, Lionel is Lavender, and Visitor is Slate Blue.
  • In No Umbrellas Allowed, the cards describing an item's attributes are given different colors. The item's kind is gray while the rest are brown: among the latter, the objective attributes such as material have a green corner, the subjective ones such as the amount of damage have a blue corner, the cards whose values increase when you level up your shop stats have a pink corner, while cards that override brand or signature cards have a brown border.
  • The Null Tree: Each layer has a specific color.
    • Compress: Gray
    • Air: White
    • Fire: Red
    • Earth: Brown
    • Water: Blue
    • Infinity: Turquoise
    • Star: Yellow
    • Planet: Cyan
    • Eternity: Magenta
  • Each Zone in OFF has two main color schemes, one for exteriors and one for interiors, which pops against the Deliberately Monochrome characters. Zone 0 is yellow and amber, Zone 1 is lime green and purple, Zone 2 is pink and blue, and Zone 3 is orange and spring green, respectively for outside and inside. The Room is mostly black, but Hugo's room is red. All Zones become white all over once they become purified.
  • In Bungie's Oni, hit sparks are color-coded to indicate the health of whomever is taking damage: green hit sparks represent a healthy combatant, yellow indicates having approximately half their health left, and red indicates near-death.
  • In Osmos, you control a primordial cell and the gameplay consists of assimilating other cells. The player-controlled cell is bright blue. The cells that are small enough to be absorbed are blue-coloured, or at least have a blue ring around them, while ones that will absorb you are red in colour.
  • The Pg Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Prestige: Green
    • Elementary School: Yellow
    • Middle School: Rust
  • PAYDAY 3:
    • Standard cops are clad in dark blue, whilst Hostage Rescue units are clad in white and sabotage teams wear black and gold.
    • Hitmarkers are coloured white for bodyshots, yellow for headshots, and red for kills.
  • Pikmin: There are seven main subspecies of these adorable creatures whose special abilities are often defined by their color, though other times the color is simply meant to differentiate them. For example, Red Pikmin are immune to fire, Yellow Pikmin are immune to electricity, and White Pikmin are immune to poison. Purple Pikmin, who have no particular resistance, are known for their brute strength while Winged Pikmin (pink), who otherwise have no other abilities, have tiny wings which allow them to fly.
  • In Pixel Dungeon, the potions follow a strict 1 color = 1 potion type code. Which means that is you have a crimson potion and it is a Potion of Healing, then you can know for sure that all healing potions are crimson and all crimson potions are healing potions
    • What makes it not so convenient is that you initially don't know which color is which effect, and the association is randomly set for every new game. So maybe now those crimson potions are not Potions of Healing but Potions of Liquid Fire and you should really not drink them.
  • Plague Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Virus: Gray
    • Infectivity: Dark red
    • Replicators: Purple
    • Uncoaters: Light blue
    • Symptoms: Green
    • Deaths: Red
    • Fatality: Bright red
    • Infecters: Aquamarine
    • CTNA: Dark sea green
    • Unvaxxed virus: Cadet blue
    • Unvaxxed infectivity: Pink
    • Unvaxxed replicators: Blue
    • Unvaxxed prions: Turquoise
    • Unvaxxed uncoaters: Lavender
    • Unvaxxed symptoms: Mustard
  • The PlayStation 2 used this to help differentiate between the CDs and DVDs that its games came out on: CDs were blue while DVDs were silver. The use of blue also differentiates CD-based PS2 games from PlayStation games, which used black CDs.
  • Pokémon:
    • The three starters of each Gen are Green, Red, and Blue.
    • Pikachu is officially the Yellow of Gen I, but implicitly the Yellow of every Gen because of the Anime, despite how many expies it has.
    • Also, each of the 18 types has a color associated with it:
    • In a large number of cases, Pokémon in general will ascribe to a certain colour scheme. Fire types tend to be red or orange, Water blue, Poison purple of varying shades, Electric blue or yellow, Ice white or light blue, Ghost grey, Dark black, Dragon blues and blue-greens (at least in part), Ground brown and dusty orange, Rock brown and grey, Normal brown or beige, Grass green, and Steel grey. Psychic, Fighting and Fairy are more varied in general, and Bug types often have colourful shells or wings, as real-life arthropods do, though there are a lot of red, orange, and green Bug types, they aren't prevalent enough.
    • And each of the version mascots, except in Black and White, matches its version color. For the ones that aren't obvious by the name, Crystal is purple/light blue, Diamond is baby blue, Pearl is pink, and Platinum is gray, red, and gold.
    • This even extends to most prominent NPC trainers, particularly Gym Leaders and Elite Four members, who will often dress predominantly in colors that correspond to the type that they specialize in (Water trainers wear varying shades of blue, Fire trainers wear red/orange, Electric trainers wear yellow, etc.).
  • Prayer of the Faithless: The behavior of the Pre-existing Encounters is indicated by their color, as the guide says. Green wants their space, Red hunts down people, Blue must be forced to fight, and Black is just dangerous, nothing about behavior.
  • The Prestige Forest: Each layer has its own color.
    • Particles: White
    • Atoms: Sky Blue
    • Chemicals: Red
  • The Prestige Rectangle: Each layer (or set of them in the case of L1 to L4) has its own color.
    • L1, L2, L3, L4: Green
    • Middle/Corner: Yellow
    • Lines: Orange
  • The Prestige Tree: Alternate: The nodes have these colors:
    • Prestige points: Teal
    • Knowledge: Red
    • Skills: Orange
    • Books: Beige
    • Factories: Grey
    • Rockets: White
    • Chaos gems: Salmon
    • Order power: Blue
    • Intelligence: Mint
  • Prestige Tree Condensed: All the layers still have their own colors, but now there's a Condenser layer that's a slightly darker shade of teal than Prestige.
  • Prestige Tree Rewritten: Each layer has its own colour.
    • Prestige: Teal
    • Boosters: Cerulean
    • Generators: Mint
    • Time: Green
    • Enhance: Violet
    • Space: Platinum
    • Super Boosters: Navy blue
    • Super Generators: Lime
    • Solarity: Orange
    • Hinderance: Maroon
    • Quirks: Magenta
    • Subspace: White (a brighter shade than regular space)
    • Magic: Fuchsia
    • Balance: Banana
    • Phantom Souls: Eggplant
    • Nebula: Midnight
    • Honour: Gold
    • Hyperspace: Periwinkle
    • Imperium: Cream
    • Mastery: Salmon
    • Gears: Silver
    • Machines: Taupe
    • Energy: Yellow
    • Neurons: Lilac
    • Ideas: Lemon
    • Robots: Sky blue
    • AIs: Metallic gray (with a very slight yellow-greenish tinge).
    • Civilizations: Lavender
  • Prestige Universe: Each layer has a specific color.
    • Prestige: Green
    • Super prestige: Light blue
    • Mega prestige: Purple
    • Mythic prestige: Red
    • Legendary prestige: Yellow
  • In Prison Architect, the colour of the prisoners' shirts determine the security level. Grey means minimum security, orange means normal security, and brown means high security.
  • In Quilts & Cats of Calico, Patch Tiles and buttons come in pink, yellow, green, light blue, navy blue, and purple. Chaining three Patch Tiles of the same color gives you a button of the corresponding color, and collecting all six gives you the Rainbow Button.
  • In Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc's trailer cinematics and box art, using the power-ups only changes the appearance of Rayman's fists in a way that would be reasonable for the power-up itself (spikes, missile launcher, lockjaw, etc). In-game, however, picking up any power-up will also give Rayman a differently-colored appearance to more easily show to the player which power-up they're currently using. This is lampshaded when Globox scolds Rayman for 'dressing up in silly costumes' in several parts throughout the game.
  • In Rescue on Fractalus!, ace pilots (worth more points than regular pilots) wear purple helmets instead of the usual white. Aliens' heads are green, allowing you to tell apart real pilots and alien impostors. On later levels, however, the aliens get savvy and begin wearing white helmets.
  • Resident Evil:
    • Ammo pickups in Resident Evil 4, Resident Evil 5, and Resident Evil: Revelations have the following color scheme: Handgun ammo is red, shotgun ammo is green, sniper rifle ammo is white, submachine gun and assault rifle ammo is blue, magnum ammo is black, and Hand Cannon ammo (only found in 4) is yellow.
    • The more realistic ammo system introduced in Resident Evil 6 does something similar: 9 mm ammo is red, 12-gauge shotgun shells are green, 10-gauge shotgun shells are gold, 5.56 mm ammo is purple, 7.62 mm ammo is blue, 12.7 mm ammo is magenta, .500 Smith & Wesson ammo is silver, and .50 Action Express ammo is black.
    • Resident Evil: Revelations 2 has the following ammo color scheme: Handgun ammo is red, shotgun ammo is green, assault rifle ammo is purple, submachine gun ammo is orange, sniper rifle ammo is blue, and magnum ammo is silver.
  • In Resonance of Fate, weapons, damage displays, and damage is displayed in either blue or red, depending on if they do Scratch or Direct Damage, respectively.
  • Ring Fit Adventure uses four different colors for each type of exercise: Yellow for abs, blue for legs, red for arms, and green for yoga. Early on Ring gets the "Color Coding" ability which causes your skills to deal extra damage to enemies with the matching color.
  • The Hard version of Rockman No Constancy colors Mega Man green rather than blue.
  • Saints Row has each gang in each game represented by a different colour, so one knows who's who on the streets.
    • Purple: Third Street Saints
    • Yellow: Vice Kings/Ronin
    • Red: Los Carnales/Brotherhood/Morningstar
    • Green: Sons of Samedi/Luchadores
    • Blue: Westside Rollerz/Deckers/Marshall Defense Industries
    • Orange: Ultor Corporation/Los Panteros
    • Pink: The Idols
    • In Saints Row IV areas in the Steelport simulation controlled by the Zin are red-orange while areas controlled by The President are blue.
  • In the Sakura Wars series, each of the protagonists Mini-Mecha is colored to help distinguish them:
    • Original Imperial Combat Revue (Sakura Wars (1996) through Sakura Wars 4)
      • Ogami: White
      • Sakura: Pink
      • Sumire: Purple
      • Iris: Yellow
      • Kohran: Green
      • Kanna: Red
      • Orihime: Magenta
      • Reni: Blue
    • Paris Combat Revue (Sakura Wars 3)
      • Erica: Red
      • Glycine: Blue
      • Lobelia: Green
      • Hanabi: Black
      • Coquelicot: Pink
    • New York Combat Revue (Sakura Wars: So Long, My Love)
      • Shinjiro: White with red accents
      • Gemini: Orange
      • Cheiron: Black
      • Subaru: Purple
      • Rosita: Green
      • Diana: Sky blue
      • Ratchet: Teal
    • New Imperial Combat Revue (Sakura Wars (2019))
      • Kamiyama: White
      • Sakura: Pink
      • Hatsuho: Red
      • Azami: Yellow
      • Claris: Green
      • Anastasia: Navy blue
  • Shantae and the Seven Sirens: Slimes react to Shantae's magic dances, and each color except blue connects to the dance that does an effect, such as the purple iconed Seer Dance and the purple slime.
  • Sim Settlements 2 color codes plot types are color-coded in Workshop Mode through floating UI, and by their ASAM Sensor. The interface uses red for residential, blue for commercial, yellow for industrial, green for agricultural, grey for martial, orange for municipal, and purple for recreational.
  • Skies of Arcadia has its six oddly colored Moons that also correspond with elements, as well as the continent under it's environment:
  • Sonic the Hedgehog:
    • Each of the characters' fur/feather/body color tends to follow them everywhere. An interesting case is Shadow, whose fur is Black with Red highlights: he is usually associated with Blacks and Grays or Dark Red, but for some reason, his attacks are all orange.
    • In the game Sonic Heroes, the twelve playable characters are divided into four teams of three members each. Each team consists of a speed character, a flying character, and a power character. Most obstacles are color-coded to tell the player which team member is intended to clear that obstacle with blue for speed, yellow for flying, and red for power. These colors are based on the fur colors of the "main" team featuring Sonic as the speed member, Tails as the flying member, and Knuckles as the power member.
    • In the Sonic Boom games, each obstacle is colored similar to the character meant to interface with it. Homing Attack targets and Dash blocks are blue; air vents are yellow; rough rocks and craters are red, balance beams and swing poles are pink (Rise of Lyric only). Boomerang targets (Shattered Crystal only) are uncolored.
  • The Space Tree:
    • Each layer has its own color. Space is white, while dust is sand.
    • Each dust type is colored differently. Regular dust is sand, moon dust is white, asteroid dust is gray, and volcanic dust is carmine.
  • In The Spectrum Retreat, the basic puzzle element are gates that will only let you through if your phone is carrying a matching colour, which you can get from various cubes scattered around the area.
  • In Spell Swap, the spells casted are always the same colour as their caster.
  • In Spin Rhythm, you need to hit the right note colour with the right disk segment. By default, the colours are pink/blue for notes, purple and cyan for right/left spins respectively and yellow for clap notes; these colours are fully customizable, though.
  • In Spyro Reignited Trilogy, each game is given differently-colored menus on the game select screen and in-game: Spyro the Dragon (1998) is purple, Ripto's Rage! is blue, and Year of the Dragon is orange.
  • The Stardust Tree: Each layer has its own color.
    • Stardust: Dark gray
    • Stars: Yellow
    • Nebulae: Indigo
    • Crystals: Lilac
  • The platform game Star Guard, also with Retraux graphics, uses simple colors as well. You and your allies are green. Deadly things are red.
  • Star Wars: The Old Republic gives each advanced class an icon above the user's name. With the exception of Jedi Consulars and Sith Inquisitors, their color corresponds to the color of their mirrored advanced class's icon:
    • Lavender — Jedi Guardian and Sith Juggernaut
    • Red — Jedi Sentinel and Sith Marauder
    • Cyan — Jedi Sage and Sith Assassin
    • Indigo — Jedi Shadow and Sith Sorcerer
    • Dark green — Commando and Mercenary
    • Lime green — Vanguard and Powertech
    • Yellow — Gunslinger and Sniper
    • Orange — Scoundrel and Operative
  • Super Dungeon Bros: All four knights wear different-coloured armour.
    • Axl wears blue armour.
    • Freddie wears red armour.
    • Lars wears yellow armour.
    • Ozzie wears green armour.
  • In the Super Mario Bros. series, you can tell Palette Swapped enemies/generic species behavior based on color:
    • The Lumas: White (Luma), Black (Polari), Purple (Lubba), Red (flying), Orange (Co-star), Yellow (launch star), Green (green star), Blue (Lumalee Lumabop), and Pink (Hungry Luma).
    • Koopa Troopas and Paratroopas: Green (walk in straight line for Troopas, hop aimlessly for Paratroopas), Red (walk back and forth for Troopas, fly up or down or side to side for Paratroopas), Blue (like a red one but faster and kicks shells when out of their shells), and Yellow (follow Mario and flashes if they enter into a shell when they don't have one).
    • Goombas: Brown (on dry land), Blue (in caves), and Gray (in castles).
    • Piranha Plants: Green (hides in pipes when Mario/Luigi is near it) and Red (comes out of pipes even when Mario/Luigi is near it, but will not come out if Mario/Luigi is on top of it).
    • Cheep Cheeps: Red (faster, can jump out of water) and Greennote (slower, always in water).
    • Bros.: green (Hammer and Sledgehammer), Blue (Boomerang), Red (Fire), Cyan (Ice), Purple (AFHB) and Orange (sumo)
  • In Super Smash Bros. Wii U/3DS, Shulk's Monado Arts are coded by different colours alongside their respective kanji symbols in order to make it easier to tell them apart from each other. "Jump" is green, "Speed" is blue, "Shield" is yellow, "Buster" is purple, and "Smash" is red.
  • The Talos Principle: The sigil colors indicate both their purpose and the approximate (but by no means accurate) difficulty in acquiring them.
    • Green sigils are for unlocking new level hubs, and are easy to get.
    • Yellow sigils are for unlocking equipment, and are moderately more difficult.
    • Red sigils unlock levels of the central tower, and are much more difficult.
    • Gray sigils unlock secret endings, and require mastery of puzzle mechanics to complete them.
    • Stars unlock some additional puzzle zones, and require quite a bit of non-linear problem-solving to obtain.
  • The characters in Team Fortress 2 work for two companies called RED and BLU [sic]. It's no coincidence that the Administrator and her assistant both wear purple. Gray Mann, his robots, and the classic mercenaries wear gray (though in-game his bots wear blue due to confusion from testers). Gray's daughter Olivia wears forest green. Merasmus and The Bombonomicon both emit a bright green glow. The Horseless Headless Horsemann and Monoculus glow violet. Even with all the unlockable weapons and modifiable accessories, the game has never allowed you to wear the colors of the opposite team (not counting disguised Spies).
  • In-Universe the shadowlings colors from Telepath RPG indicate their age going from red to purple to blue and finally to green, but for gameplay purpose, every shadowling healers is blue because blue is the color of the shield powers which serves as healing spell.
  • Teppen divides its heroes and cards into four colors, or "elements", that dictate their playstyle.
    • Red heroes and cards focus on offense, whether by boosting units' attack power or directly attacking opposing units and heroes.
    • Green heroes and cards focus on survival, bolstering the defenses and recovering the health of allied units and heroes.
    • Purple heroes and cards focus on interfering with the opponent, with tactics such as restricting their playing field, hiding one's own cards, and interfering with the opponent's MP meter.
    • Black heroes and cards focus on sacrificing units and HP to unleash powerful attacks: high risk, high reward.
  • Terraria: The clearest distinction between the four Celestial Pillars and their associated enemies/equipment is color. Orange is used for Solar, teal for Vortex, sky blue for Stardust, and pink for Nebula.
  • Titan Quest has ten different masteries, each with its distinctive color:
    • Warfare is Yellow.
    • Rogue is Magenta.
    • Defense is Gray.
    • Hunt is Orange.
    • Storm is Blue.
    • Nature is Green.
    • Spirit is Teal.
    • Earth is Red.
    • Dream is Violet.
    • Rune is Brown.
    • In addition to that, colors are used to identify the quality of items (Gray for broken items, White for standard, Yellow for magic, Green for rare, Blue for enchanted, Purple for legendary) and certain enemies (commons have White names, champions have Yellow names, Bosses have Red names, uniques have Lavender names).
  • In Timberborn, each faction is associated with a different colour. The Folktails' fur and buildings are light tan, while the Iron Teeth are slate-colored.
  • In To the Rescue!, the four dog food brands are given different colors, and you have to give your dogs the correct ones or else they'll poop more often.
  • In the Tomba! series, Items are split into 3 colors in the select item menu: Green, Blue, and Pink. Green Items are equippable weapons and clothes. Blue items are regular items such as the Buckets and lunch boxes. Pink Items are special automatic use items such as the Evil Pig Bags and the Treasure Chest Keys that can only be used by talking to the right NPC or doing something in the right location.
  • Tomb Raider III: The Save Crystals for the PS1 version emanate a bright blue light, making them extremely easy to spot from a distance and during the darker portions (which there are a lot of) each level. They can even be seen from the other side of walls they are placed too close to.
  • Too Many Softcaps: Each of the layers has its own color.
    • Prestige: Green
    • Power: Blue
    • Softcap power: Yellow
  • Touhou Project games have red items for power, blue for score, green for Smart Bombs (except in 10 and 11, where bombs were tied to power, and green items increased the value of blue items), and purple for extra lives.
    • After Mountain of Faith, red fairies give you power, and blue fairies give you points.
  • Bot classes in Transformers Forged to Fight are color-coded like this: Warriors are red, Scouts are green, Techs are cyan, Demolitions are yellow, Tactitians are blue, and Brawlers are purple.
  • In Trauma Center, there is a type of GUILT called Tetarti. It can come in groups of 3 with three, four, or five colors. Their color is shown when they appear and then they turn gray. To kill them, you must inject each one with the serum that has the same color.
  • Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon: Ships originating from from each faction all follow a similar colour scheme.
    • Imperial ships have brown hulls, yellow sails, and blue accents.
    • Pirate ships have dark brown hulls, red sails, and red and yellow accents.
    • Procyon ships have brown and white hulls, white sails and green accents.
    • Civilian ships have brown hulls, white sails, and yellow accents.
    • Ironclads, due to their steel hulls and lack of sails, are entirely grey.
  • Tree Inc.: Each layer has a specific color.
    • Workforce: Grey
    • Training: Dark green
    • Morale: Light mint
    • Investments: Orange
  • The Tree of Life:
    • Each layer has its own color.
      • Hydrogen: Olive
      • Carbon: Green
      • Oxygen: Cyan
      • Nitrogen: Brown
      • Phosphorus: Blue
      • Mu (µ): Purple
      • Life: Maroon
      • Amino: Orange
      • DNA: Bronze
      • Cells: Lime
      • MC (Stem cells): Violet
      • Tissues: Magenta
      • Organs: Rose
      • MH (Heart): Mustard
      • MK (Kidney): Scarlet
      • ML (Lung): Lavender
      • MI (Intestine): Cerulean
      • Animals: Yellow
      • Chromosomes: Vermilion
      • MT (Taxonomy): Cobalt blue
      • Nucleuses: Pink
      • Species: Brown
      • Ecosystems: Gold
      • Plants: Spring green
      • Humans: Aquamarine
      • Researchers: Navy blue
      • Science: Carmine
    • Customizable challenges have slightly different shades depending on what set they're part of, going from red to peach. Once they're maxed, they go from blue to purple. A selected challenge is light green, while a maxed selected challenge is dark green.
    • In the Taxonomy tab, the buyable in orange is the one that's selected, the purple one is the default that is not selected, in light-blue is the cheapest, and the light-green one is not the cheapest but you can afford it. Each row also has a subtly different shade for those.
    • In the Animal Achievements tab, each achievement is normally yellow, but it becomes light-blue if its effects are always active regardless of state.
  • The Tree of Nerfs 2: Each layer has its own color.
    • Prestige: Brown
    • Super prestige: Indigo
    • Layer: Light blue
    • Aarex: Apricot
    • Distance: Violet
    • Antimatter: Forest
    • Challenges: Olive
    • Despacit: Evergreen
    • Choices: White
    • XYZ: Red
    • Meta: Yellow
    • Superscaled: Green
    • AB: Orange
    • Whack-A-Clickable: Blue
    • Buffs: Gray
  • Tuba's Tree: Each layer has a color to indicate things in it.
    • Prestige: Navy blue
    • Ascension: Yellow
    • Transcension: Violet
    • Reincarnation: Green
    • Super-prestige: Light blue
  • Undertale uses colors to both represent traits and types of attacks/modes in battle:
    • White is used for basic attacks. It is the color of monster souls and does not seem to have an associated trait.
    • Gray "attacks" are harmless and mainly only show up as text for humor. There are no known gray souls in the game.
    • Red is the default color of the player character's soul. What trait it represents is unknown.
    • Orange represents bravery. Orange attacks will not harm the player while they are moving.
    • Yellow represents justice. When the player's soul is yellow, they can shoot magic at certain bullets, which has a different effect depending on the bullet.
    • Green represents kindness. Green "attacks" heal the player when touched, or represent safety in some way. When the player's soul is green, it becomes equipped with a shield that can spin around.
    • Cyan represents patience. Cyan attacks will not harm the player while they are holding still.
    • Blue represents integrity. When the player's soul is blue, it is affected by gravity, and has to "jump" to avoid attacks.
    • Purple/magenta represents perseverance. When the player's soul is purple, it is tied to "lines" and has to hop between them.
  • The Upgrading Tree: Each layer has its own color which is almost always changed from the original Prestige Tree.
    • Prestige: Light blue
    • Boosters: Dark blue
    • Generators: Dark green
    • Time: Light green
    • Space: White
  • The User Tree: Each layer has a specific color. The ones that appear in 2 have the same colors as the ones in Prestige Tree.
    • Prestige: Teal (crimson if "crimson406" is used as the code)
    • Booster: Medium blue
    • Infinity: Yellow
    • Super prestige: Slightly darker teal (slightly brighter crimson if "crimson406" is used as the code)
  • In the Vietcong series, anti-communist forces will always wear camouflaged (ERDL/Tigerstripe), lime, or brown uniforms while the NVA wears dark green and tan uniforms. Some VCs in the first game (or all of them in the second) wear black pajamas.
  • In the card game War of Omens the 4 factions correspond to a colour. Vespitole/Green, Daramek/Red, Metris/Blue, and Endazu/Purple
  • In Wario World, the 8 treasure chests and their corresponding buttons are Colour-Coded for Your Convenience. The 5 colors for the Spritelings also count.
  • In the Wing Commander series, Terran Confederation fighters are generally painted in bright colors, typically silvers and greens for the first two games and bright grey for the remaining (except for the Excalibur and Dragon superfighters, which have dark-colored hulls). Kilrathi fighters are generally ochres and darker colors. And Border Worlds Militia fighters are gunmetal grey.
  • Largely averted in Wizorb. The multi-coloured blocks and boxes will usually drop different things depending on the part of the level they're in. This includes the Poison Mushroom items.
  • In World of Goo, different species of goo balls have different colour. It'll be difficult to tell them apart without this.
  • In World of Warcraft, each class is given a color that is used for their name in chat, their map icon, their raid profile, and their name on most websites:
    • Beige - Warrior
    • Pink - Paladin
    • Mint - Hunter
    • Azure - Mage
    • Lavender - Warlock
    • Canary - Rogue
    • Navy — Shaman
    • White — Priest
    • Orange — Druid
    • Red — Death knight
    • Teal — Monk
    • Indigo — Demon hunter
  • In The World Ends with You, it would be easier to list the things that AREN'T using this trope. The most prominent use of this trope comes into play when scanning for Noise. Red symbols are your typical encounter, orange symbols are usually tied to a mission objective, green are Pig Noise which drop Shop Fodder when defeated, blue are Boss Noise (most of them only show up in the post-game), and black are Taboo Noise. Black symbols will also float towards you in order to start a battle.
  • In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, the type of a weapon can reliably be known by the color of the blast. Firearms are brownish white, lasers are always bright red, and plasma is always bright green. (There are a few other weapons that don't fit this scheme, most of them are white or gold and are uncommonly powerful.) It is of course completely unrealistic (bullets are not usually tracer rounds, lasers that would be suitable as personal weapons would probably be infrared and therefore invisible, and plasma is just very, very hot stuff so it would appear a very bright blueish-white should it somehow be weaponized.)
  • In Wibble Wobble, all of the lethal hazards are coloured red.
  • The Wii U came in a white model and a black one; a white Wii U could store 4 GB of internal memory (which, given the size of some of its games, isn't exactly spacious) while a black Wii U could store 32 GB.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles 1 and its sequel has one for enemies levels and how dangerous they are.
    • Black — The enemy is at least 6 levels lower than yours. The enemies accuracy and evasion skills are heavily nerfed as well as their damage output but you gain very little EXP, AP and SP.
    • Blue — The enemy is 3-5 levels lower than yours.
    • White — The enemy is equal to you. Accuracy and evasion stats aren't changed. This difficulty is recommended for beginners.
    • Yellow — The enemy is stronger than you by 3-5 levels. Now you start to get punished to fight them. This difficulty is recommended for advanced players.
    • Red — The enemy is stronger than you by 6 or more levels. These fights are almost impossible to win without the correct set up required because you cannot hit the target. You gain 1.5x the Experience as you would for defeating a white enemy.
  • The Japan-only Nintendo Power flash cartridges for the Game Boy and Super Famicom were white, compared to the usual light gray.
  • Anytime Sunless Sea brings up the color red in the context of food or as part of the phrase "rich and red," it's referring to cannibalism. And by extension, the Drowned Man.
  • In Candies 'n Curses, enemies use one of three elements. The element used is indicated by the color of their border — Blue border means physical, yellow means fire, and green means poison.
  • In Minecraft, users can color code their chat messages to differentiate the messages of teammates from other players. Also, the color coding is avaialable for setting MOTD on your Minecraft server. There are a total of 16 Minecraft color codes are available in the game. Every color code in Minecraft is combination of '§' sign followed by a digit from 0-9 or an alphabet from a-f.
  • 911 Operator: The situations that demand a police response are illustrated on the map with blue icons, fires in red, and medical situations are in white. Sometimes, though, a situation of one type will need back-up from one or both of other services: i.e. more dangerous police situations benefit from an ambulance being on scene to treat any wounded, while the severe car crashes require firefighters to clear the pile-up and avoid any fuel ignition, ambulances to deliver the wounded to hospitals, and police to deal with the paperwork.

    Visual Novels 
  • In CLANNAD, the color of the shield of the Hikarizaka school uniform tells you what year the student is... blue for senior, red for junior and green for freshman.

    Web Animation 
  • In Smash King, Bowser's various Ascent Mode forms indicate what powers he will likely use.
  • An Adventure of Sheep and Chicken: Each character's dialogue is colour-coded according to their color(ie. being red, Sheep's dialogue is enclosed in a red speech bubble
  • Battle for Dream Island:
    • The three teams in are the three primary colors of light. The Squashy Grapes are green, the Squishy Cherries are red, and Another Name is blue.
    • Averted in the second season, where none of the teams are given an official color.
    • This comes back in season 4, where each of the 8 teams has its own color (Death PACT — black, A Better Name Than That — blue, Team Ice Cube — white, Free Food — red, The Losers — yellow, iance — pink, Beep — green, Bleh — gray).
    • All the items the teams require for challenges are also color-coded.
  • The villains of the show "Cheat Commandos" from Homestar Runner are actually named Blue Laser.
  • Extra Credits color codes their series.
    • Green for Extra Credits.
    • Orange for Extra History.
    • Blue for Extra Sci-fi.
    • Purple for Extra Mythology.

    Webcomics 
  • Invoked in Adventurers!, where a (probably ice) dragon painted himself red to make the adventurers think he was a fire dragon and thus immune to all their fire weaponry. It worked, and they just gave up.
  • Bicycle Boy: The Senator's soldiers all wear bright red spectacles, and every man has a splash of red on his outfit. The guards in LSC also wear matching orange ponchos.
  • The Black Brick Road of O.Z.'s witches all have a corresponding color which they seem to share with the Country they rule (for example Pepper's color is yellow and Bastille's is violet).
  • High School Lessons: Whenever residents of the different towns are shown together, they're depicted wearing their respective high school colors.
  • Homestuck: A bunch of things have associated colours:
    • Celestial Bodies — Derse has purple, Prospit has yellow, Alternia's moons are green (tied to the felt) and pink. The Green Sun is the same shade of green associated with Lord English. The Cherubs' planet is colored red by a red sun.
    • Groups — The armies of Derse and Prospit have black and white respective due to Chess Motifs being in effect; the Felt (including Doc Scratch and Lord English) all have the same shade of green.
    • Realities — Kids' and Trolls' universes respectively are depicted as red and blue (a motif tied to Sollux's bifurcation quirk and red and blue eye/ glasses). Different versions of Sburb in different universes are different colors as well, green for the pre-scratch Earth, purple for Alternia, and red for post-scratch Earth.
    • Aspects — Blood players have brown and burgundy god-tier costumes, Breath players wear cyan and light blue, Doom players wear emerald and forest green, Heart players wear magenta and pink, Hope players wear white and gold, Life players wear light green and beige, Light players wear yellow and orange, Mind players wear teal and aqua, Rage players wear lavender and purple, Space players wear black and white, Time players wear red and maroon, Void players wear royal blue and navy.
  • Hue Are You: There are three factions: Red, Blue, and Grey. These are the only colors you can see at first within the comic, plus brown, as it is done from the view point of what the robots can see. These are revealed to have meaning in the dreams Build-a has.
    • Red Meaning appears to represent hard work and self reliance based on the red dream door
    • Blue Meaning appears to represent creativity and beauty based on the blue dream door
    • Brown Meaning appears to represent danger and self preservation based on the brown dream door
    • Grey Meaning appears to represent safety and neutrality based on the grey dream door
  • Imp: Humans are red and imps are blue. Besides that, Celina seems to be associated with lime green and her imp with cyan.
  • Iron Crown:
    • All the main factions play this straight. Isandar's mercenary brigade is in warm grey and red (presumably for the warlike connection), anyone related to Chandera's dictatorship in blue and a cooler grey, and the divine order of the Judges in white and gold.
    • Also noticeable when Diane, the protagonist, picks up a jacket from Isandar's crew and discards the blue schoolgirl outfit from before. Her early concept art has both.
  • Once the game in Larp Trek begins in earnest, out-of-character panels have a grey background while in-character panels have colored backgrounds. Each character is eventually given a single, consistent color, too.
  • My Impossible Soulmate: The Grand Arcane Library's uniforms are colour-coded depending on department - Storage wears red, Chronicling wears blue, Runners wear orange, and Maintenance wears purple.
  • In NIMONA the good knight Goldenloin wears a majestic gold and white armor while villain Blackheart dons black and red. (In reality, their roles are not that simple.)
  • The Order of the Stick:
    • The Trope Namer scene is in strip 207, where the heroes discuss the fact that it's easy to tell evil dragons apart from good dragons based on their color.
    • Much later, colors are used as a metaphor to describe the "quiddities" of the different gods. The gods in the comics are usually represented as glowing with an aura, the color of which matches their pantheon (yellow for the Northern, blue for the Southern, and red for the Western). Colors are an easy shorthand representation of these quiddities.
  • Questionable Content: Penelope vomiting a rainbow mixed with Cheshire Cat Grin and Losing Your Head.
  • Rain (2010): The grading system at St. Hallvard is arranged by colored collars. 9th graders wear red, 10th graders wear orange, 11th graders wear green, and 12th graders wear blue.
  • Sarilho: The Régula II Divison wear bright red, white and gold uniforms. The Lusitanians wear more dark earth colored tones, possibly to blend in more with the surrounding forests; though they also have bits of red in their designs.
  • Schlock Mercenary gives us an in-universe example, with Lt Shodan's suspicion that a bunch of new recruits charging ahead and blazing away with their guns were prevented from shooting one another only because they were wearing the same color.
  • Starting in the second volume of Serenity Rose, important characters have coloured hair in the otherwise mostly black-and-white comic. Furthermore, sorcery is generally coloured to show that it is abnormal to the world around it and also to help identify who made it.
    • Sera has Blue hair and stuff she conjures up is usually green.
    • Vicious has bright pink hair and her magic tends to radiate a matching shade.
    • Stiletto has orange hair and her magic is blood-red
    • Tess has bright red hair, and is so far the only non-witch to have such an eye-grabbing colour.
  • In Stand Still, Stay Silent, there is a correlation between the religious beliefs of the six main characters and their hair colours, with only one of the pairs being actually related. The Finnish pantheon followers (cousins) have ash blond hair, the atheists have a more golden blond and the followers of the Norse pantheon both have red hair.

    Web Original 
  • The main characters of Antlers, Colorado are each assigned a specific color on the cast page, and these tend to carry over into the bonus art and chapter banners. It's not unusual for each character to be illustrated with a halo of their respective color.
  • In the world of Dina Marino most of the characters have a specific color they always wear and even their belongings and places will reflect their specific color.
  • In Elcenia, dragons' colors indicate their magical abilities. In addition to breathing fire of their color, reds gets improved firebreathing and fire resistance, greens get magical empathy, blues are better shapeshifters, violets can breathe underwater, blacks get improved senses, and whites fly better.
  • The titular films in Shea Scientific Films are color-coded according to the CMYK color space by topic; biology/Earth science, physics, chemistry, and space, respectively.
  • TV Tropes: The normal wiki has a white background, YMMV has a blue one, Sugar Wiki has pink, and Darth Wiki has black.
  • Since Skawo has three channels, the text box has a different colour for all three. Red for the main channel, blue for the secondary and green for the third.
  • An in-universe example for Twisted Cogs. All the garzona and studios are identifiable by their colors.
  • In The Falcon Cannot Hear, each of the five major factions in the Second American Civil War ends up nicknamed with a color — the American Soviet Republic, being Communists, naturally are already dubbed the Reds. In response, the fascist coalition led by Huey Long starts referring to itself as the Whites, in reference to the anti-Communist side in the Russian Civil War. Meanwhile, the democratically socialist Provisional Government is referred to as the Blues, Douglas MacArthur's military government is the Khakis, and the agrarian Continental Congress is the Greens.

    Web Videos 
  • The lead characters in Bite Me! are always dressed in the primary colors, Mike, Jeff, and Greg in yellow, blue, and red respectively.
  • In the Dead Meat channel's Kill Count reviews of horror movies, the kill tally uses several colors to count victims — blue for males, red for females, grey for the undead or victims of unknown gender, and green for extraterrestrials.
  • Funday Night Gaming does this whenever it's reasonably possible in-game, but always on video thumbnails and in corner antics. The colors were chosen based on the clothing on their Minecraft skins.
  • Movie reviewer Jeremy Jahns uses color to distinguish his videos. Red background? A review. Pretty much anything else has a blue background.
  • Life SMP: Player names are displayed in different colours depending on how many lives they have, and many also choose to change their Minecraft skins to reflect their life count — green indicates three lives, yellow is two, and red is one.
    • In Season 2, also titled Last Life SMP, players have the possibility of obtaining four or more lives, which is indicated by dark green.
    • In Season 4, also titled Limited Life SMP, due to the 24-hour time limit and change in game mechanism, green indicates having more than 16 hours to live, yellow is 8-16, and red is 0-8.
    • The Fan Community Nicknames of the series are taken from this colour coordination, drawing comparisons between the lives' colour scheme and traffic lights.
  • New Life SMPnote : Each player has six lives in total, and each life is indicated with a health bar of different colours: default red, orange, yellow, light green, blue/cyan, and purple.
  • Colour selection in film is discussed in this episode of Renegade Cut.
  • In their Grand Theft Auto Online races, each of the Sidemen usually drive vehicles in a specific colour:
    • Behzinga is red.
    • KSI used to be hot pink, but now he goes with black. To differentiate between him and TBJZL, KSI's T20 has extra yellow side colours and green rims.
    • Miniminter is white.
    • TBJZL is black, though he sometimes changed to hot pink whenever custom cars/bikes aren't allowed to avoid confusion between him and JJ.
    • Vikkstar123 is race yellow, for a reason. He also had a habit of driving purple Blazer ATVs.
    • wroetoshaw is light blue, since he regularly wore light blue jumpers. His T20 has a darker shade of blue.
    • Zerkaa was orange, but in 2018, he switched to green after then-Sidemen associate Wizzite took orange as his colour. Prior to that, he used green in minigolf games.
  • In Skawo's playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures the commentators text boxes are colour co-ordinated to the colour of the link they control.
  • In Sky Williams' thumbnails, there are colored clouds that mean different things. A black cloud means the video focuses on a dark subject matter. The other colors are based on a "rarity system" similar to what's found in Blizzard Entertainment games. White is "common," blue "rare," purple "epic," and orange "legendary." In practice, they denote the amount of editing and effort put into the quality of the content, meaning that a "common" video might merely be a League of Legends session and a "legendary" video might be a full-blown comedy skit. The clouds are described in more detail on the subreddit.
  • Mystery Incorporated (2022)
    • As usual, Shaggy is associated with greens, Velma is associated with oranges, Fred is associated with whites and blues, and Daphne is associated with pinks and purples.
    • Daphne's rival, Ophelia, is associated with yellow and has a line lampshadeing this trope by confirming she always wears yellow.

    Western Animation 
  • Amphibia: Each of the three temples is tinted with a different color according to the Calamity Gems each respective one will charge: green for the first, blue for the second, and pink for the third.
  • Towers in Code Lyoko glow different colors depending on who is controlling them at the moment.
    • XANA — Red
    • Jeremie — Green
    • Uncontrolled — Blue
    • Franz Hopper — White. Also used for inactive towers on Lyoko in later seasons, which is either a continuity error or Fridge Brilliance.
  • Dexter's Laboratory — Mee Mee and Lee Lee (Dee Dee's friends) wear green and purple versions of her outfit.
  • G.I. Joe — The good guys shot red laser beams and the bad guys shot blue ones. If a good guy picked up a bad guy's weapon and started firing...it would switch colors.
  • God Rocks!: Chip, Gem, Splinter, and Carb are blue, pink, green, and yellow respectively and have their live-action counterparts wearing a shirt with their color on it.
  • H₂O: Mermaid Adventures: Each of the girls has an individually coloured tail as a mermaid: purple for Cleo, red for Rikki and orange for Emma.
  • Hong Kong Phooey: When a criminal disguises himself as Hong Kong Phooey to claim the rewards offered to the real one, the viewers can always tell who's who because the real one wears a red kimono and the false one wears a black one.
  • SpongeBob SquarePants — The three main characters who live on Conch Street are presented in the primary colors; SpongeBob (yellow), Patrick (pink, which is a shade of red), and Squidward (blue).
    • Also presented among the three Krusty Krab workers, where Mr. Krabs replaces Patrick.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
    • Republic-affiliated characters wield blasters that fire blue bolts, and Separatist-affiliated characters, as well as criminals and mercenaries, fire red bolts. Mandalorians fire yellow bolts. Then, it got tangled up:
    • In "Mystery of a Thousand Moons" the vulture droids R2 controls in the plan to destroy the superweapon have their eyes turn green when he takes control.
    • Bounty Hunter Embo shoots blue bolts in his first appearance, where he and the other bounty hunters he's working with team up with Jedi Anakin, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka to fight pirates. In his later prominent appearances in the Deception and Clovis arcs, he's working for the antagonists and thus fires red bolts.
    • "Revival" takes this to G.I. Joe levels: Sith Lord Darth Maul persuades part of Hondo Ohnaka's pirate gang to work for him, leading to them fighting the faction still loyal to Hondo. The pirates affiliated with the Sith fire red bolts while Hondo's pirates fire blue bolts. Later on, Hondo persuades the traitors back to his side and they all attack the Sith, with everyone's weapons firing blue, including those of the traitors who were firing red. Fortunately, this is the only instance of such blatant colour-changing weaponry in the series.
  • Thomas & Friends: In the TV series, the Skarloey Railway engines are different colors, while in the Railway Series, they were all red. This is because the producers didn't want to confuse young children with similar looking characters.
  • The Owl House: Pictures from Eda Clawthorne school days show her wearing the yellow uniform of a Potions student before she left Hexside. In the present, she uses these teachings to create home-made elixirs to sell, making up some of her regular income.
  • The Transformers: Certain teams/subgroups are identified by matching colour schemes:
    • The Dinobots are primarily gold, silver/grey and red. Swoop stands out by having blue in his colour scheme (sometimes).
    • The primary three Insecticons are black, purple and yellow. However, the toyline exclusive "Deluxe" Insecticons do not conform to this, with each of them having a unique color scheme.
    • The Constructicons are primarily green and purple, replacing the green with yellow in G2 (which incidentally is closer to actual construction vehicles). They're the most uniform of all the teams in this regard, with individual Constructions only being told apart by their other qualities.
    • The Predacon combiner team is primarily orange, gold and red (warm colors). Down the line, their descendants and namesakes from Beast Wars would not have any sort of matching color scheme, making the originals seem odd in retrospect.
  • On Wild Kratts, Martin always wears blue and Chris always wears green. This carries over to their activated Creature Power Suits, making it easier to keep track of who's who when they're using animal forms. On the rare occasions when the female team members don a Power Suit, Aviva's suit and animal-forms are always purple, while Koki's (save her blue Blue Jay form in the Christmas special) are orange-to-brown.
  • The Loud siblings in The Loud House are each represented by a color; Lincoln is orange, Lori is light blue, Leni is light green, Luna is purple, Luan is yellow, Lynn Jr. is red, Lucy is black, Lola is pink, Lana is dark blue, Lisa is dark green and Lily is lavender. This is represented both in their clothes and their coloring in the theme song.
    • Best shown in one episode, where the siblings divide the refrigerator into zones and each zone is color-coded for each sibling.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Color Coded For Your Convenience

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Liza's Suitors

Liza has a conventionally romantic fiancé in Prince Yeletsky and a passionate and unstable admirer in Herman. The color of their clothes reflects the safety and danger they respectively represent.

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