Crowd sourcing word-colour associations

Abstract

It is known that colours evoke memories and emotions and that these associations are valuable in design. However, it is difficult to ascertain universal associations because often the word-colour associations are culture- and context-specific. Nevertheless, some important universal colour associations have been shown to exist, at least if the variable of culture is removed. Laboratory studies, however, although effective struggle to collect sufficient information to allow the data to be useful in a practical setting. In this study, a crowd-sourcing internet experiment was carried out to find colours that are associated with different words and the results were compared with those from a previous laboratory study. Approximately 150 participants made a total of 1350 word-colour associations to generate palettes for 30 target words. Comparison with corresponding data from the laboratory study suggests that crowd-sourcing is a promising route and should be explored further.