branding and digital transformation
We’ve seen and read and heard about the meaning of colors—across cultures, across time, across topics, and even across people with different visual ability (i.e. blind, color-blind, etc.).
At the most simplistic levels, we know red stands for danger, stop; green is for all-clear, go; yellow is for caution, slow; pink went from being manly to effeminate, and so on.
It’s clear that colors are imbued with meaning, based on context, culture and time.
But I want to pause for a minute and ask the reverse question: is it colors that have meaning, or is it meaning that we ascribe color to? Why, and how?
Take the cacophony surrounding intolerance in the country right now. How do some people ascribe saffron to right wing intolerance? And how do some others imbue extremism with the color green?
For centuries the color of royal blood has been termed to be blue. In one fell swoop, an athletic brand turned this ancient order on its head when it asked a billion Indian citizens to bleed blue over a cricket trophy.
How did we take positivity as a point-of-view about the world and decide it was rose-tinted?
Communists are red. They were also pinkies.
Fresh, inexperienced people are green.
Evil is black.
Pure is white.
Depression is blue.
Cowardice is yellow.
Seduction is scarlet.
So, why and how do we ascribe color to meaning?
The why is fathomable. We’re wired to deal with complexity by finding and creating shortcuts that make it easier for us to recognize things, put some method to madness, and to expend less brain in dealing with things that we encounter time and again, or in multiple places. And colors, in some sense, are labels we give to stereotypes and archetypes, to phenomena we believe we, and others, will encounter more than once. They are an easy descriptor for complex metaphors and analogies.
What’s fascinating is the how of it. How, for example, did we decide cowardice is yellow? A quick trawl through the internet doesn’t deliver any convincing answers. The explanations range from jaundice (itself derived from jaune, the French word for yellow) weakening a person and making him or her too feeble to display any strength / courage, to the peculiar yellow belly skin of the 18th century inhabitants of the Lincolnshire Fens in the U.K., to yellow bile being one of the four humors (fluids) of the human body. Why, when yellow otherwise is the color of sunshine and all things cheerful, the meaning of cowardice was imbued with the color yellow, is a little mystifying.
Purity’s association with white, meanwhile, seems to have arisen not because of white’s spotlessness so much as the ability of even a smidgeon of dirt to destroy the color. Pure, by association, was that which could be destroyed by even a smidgeon of doubt.
A range of passions—from love and seduction to anger, courage, health and vigor—are associated with one color, red. This seems to have mainly physiological origins, in that the suffusion of blood, itself red in color, to the face is plainly visible in the arousal of any of the passions.
Evil’s association with black comes from darkness—the period where our main sense of perceiving things, our eyes, become useless. Darkness is the phenomenon that renders things mysterious and beyond our perception. With our inherent desire to believe in goodness and the forces of good—seemingly within our comprehension—evil goes beyond our ken. We are unable to fathom why people would be driven to evil acts, and hence, by association with other things beyond our comprehension—like the darkness, we term them black acts.
As the modern-day example of the athletic brand and the blue-bleeding billion indicates, though, it is possible for culture and context to bend even the most established associations between meaning and color. To what end is an altogether different question though.
