Travis Shaffer’s Social Media Blues is a collection of the forty most popular shades of blue used in social media interfaces. Each blue is represented as tone of the PANTONE® Color Matching System. To create it, the artist screenshotted the blues of a number of social media websites on November 15, 2010, then averaged and matched them to the closest PANTONE® color. The series begins on the cover, whose shade of blue matches that of Blurb and is specified as PANTONE® 299 C.

The PANTONE® Color Matching System is a proprietary, industry-standard color reproduction system for CMYK printing. The book’s focus on this analog color swatch contrasts with the sampling of digital colors represented in screen based RGB. As such, Social Media Blues is not only a guide to the palette of social media interface design, but also a reflection on screen colors and their representation in print. Accordingly, the statement at the end of the book reads, “The Artist also makes no warranties regarding the accuracy of the illus- trated Pantone swatches and does not recommend this guide as a tool for color management.”