Ever wonder what color Urban is? Or Prime? Thanks to an interesting bit of distributed cognition, we have a better idea.
Cymbolism associates colors with words
Cymbolism is a new website that attempts to reveal which colors go with which words by asking visitors to associate one with the other. A spiffy interactive interface presents each participant with the definition of a specific word and 19 color options (and a “skip” option) from which to choose. After voting—which could eat a lot of time, if you let it—your most recent selections are compared to those of other participants.
In addition to being an interesting diversion, Cymbolism has the potential to be a great resource for designers. Color are an important aspect of communication. While color guides abound on the web, this one may be more meaningful because it reflects wider input from those who might view a web site, as opposed to a handful of experts making color decisions.
Colors are believed to have very specific meanings, but these meanings vary over time, place and culture. For years designers have been using colors to communicate feeling and mood, to trigger memories to make us act a certain way.
Cymbolism is an attempts to quantify the association between colors and words, making it simple for designers to choose the best colors for the desired emotional effect. Cymbolism tracks these associations over time (and in future versions by user demographics) to help designers to better create designs for the desired effects.
Source: “What is Cymbolism?“
At the moment, there are 178 words in the Cymbolism dictionary, with color associations backed by over 250,000 votes. If those aren’t enough, you can suggest a new word to add to the rotation. At some point demographic breakdowns will be added to the data collection, but for now each word will show both cumulative and recent color association trends with a color spectrum indicating which colors have been selected most.
The color of Authentic
Cymbolism was developed by Suffolk Software, with some help. Suffolk has two other projects of interest: a series of “most aggregated” RSS content on various topics (including a rather cool one on movie trailers, MostPreviewed), and a challenge to release a new web site every five weeks.
The color association project, which was launched at the end of July, is the interactive part of an interesting resource on the psychology of color. Enthusiasts and designers will find much useful information on color in the Cymbolism blog.