There are a few theories on how color preferences are driven by many kind of both personal and ancestral experiences. Pleasant memories, good tastes, positive situations are all linked to some color an viceversa. We transfer all these positive informations to the color itself and than the color casts them on every product it is applied on, guiding our choices when we pick a goods in almost any everyday situation.
Words collected in the database show all this adjectives to be related to three macro groups:
- positive emotions: happiness, calm/peace/relax, fun/cheerish
- positive physical attributes: deep/rich/bold, light/clean/clear
- natural environment: sea/ocean/water, sky, day/sunny/spring, flower/nature
But same words can be associated to different colors so..
around each word is possible to find a winner color and to build a palette, with proportional cluster of color. For example the color for "peace" results to be a light turquoise and the palette for "peaceful" has the same color associated with a deep blue and a hint of medium neutral gray and so on.
There is a huge problem in this,under all the other aspects well conducted research. People were asked to something abstract. Color is not. We always experience color in a context and - naturally or artificially - applied to something.
I love a particular tint of deep magenta purple. It’s my favourite color.
There are a lot of situations in which I would never choose it.
Results shows black to be the less loved among colors and the favourite one in this category to be a dark grey actually. Everyday experience says the opposite. We love black in many aspects of our lives, the deepest, the better. The shinest, even more.
People could also have chosen the most rappresentative color in the cluster. For example to indicate orange.One could have picked the more vivid one as little shifts in the color space make it to be quickly perceived as yellow or brown. Who works in graphics knows that some color has rapid mutation, other are widely reconizable even under the effects of a large range of variations.
More to follow...