Cymbolism is a site that allows users to ‘vote’ on the color of words by selecting the color they most strongly associate with them.
In its own (uncolored) words, “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.”
Though it might just sound like a fun online curiosity, Cymbolism’s color voting could actually has some sociological value:
From Times Online:
Our response to colour is also partly physiological. Humans are trichromatic, meaning we have three colour receptors: for red, green, and blue. Most other mammals have only two, which, one theory goes, is what helped set man apart: we could more easily distinguish ripe fruit in trees.
An emerging view in scientific literature, however, is that language, as much as anything, shapes the way we perceive colour. Russian, for instance, has two totally separate categories for light and dark blue, and in a remarkable study of native Russian and English speakers in the Sixties, Russians proved more adept at distinguishing different shades of blue – not because of any greater perceptive ability, but because of their mother tongue.
Spanning cultural boundaries and finally allowing us to know what colors “love,” “government,” and “football” are? Looks like a win.
(By popular vote, those would be red/pink, gray/black, and green, respectively.)
(Cymbolism’s site. h/t Chart Porn)
