Tuesday, May 22, 2012

What's the Color of Mad?


“ Colours are light’s suffering and joy.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

 I thought it would be fun to give a color to each of the emotions. I wondered how to go about choosing, and so I sent off a questionnaire to family and friends to see if I could find any consensus. I got an interesting array of responses and not much consensus. It made me realize just how subjective our experience of color is.  Here are some of the responses from the questionnaire:

 I see love as red (vibrant), fear as black sad as gray

 I would use the blue for "happy" and the yellow for "sad" (think The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

 I hesitated at blue for sad, because even though "being blue" is feeling sad, I think of blue as a peaceful, happy, and calming color.

Have you thought of changing the  fonts of each emotion, as well as the color?

I think that you should use primary colors for primary emotions. Then there's warm verses cool colors. Primary colors have an intensity that secondary or tertiary colors lack. There's also tone, or the amount of black or grey in a color

 "What is the color of fear?" The best answer went to dark red. I was thinking "black," but probably it wouldn't work graphically.

 Here are the eight emotions in my book:

 Anger,  Fear,  Sadness,  Shame,  Surprise,  Disgust,  Happiness and  Love

 What Color Would You Use For Each  Emotion?



1 comment:

  1. Hi Peggy,

    Great post! The reference of changing fonts to correspond with the colors of feelings is terrific. I know I use comic sans when writing something fun and adventurous for children.

    I've Googled+, Tweeted and Facebook.

    Best regards,
    Donna

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