Nafhan NQAll Works / Design / Writing / Research

Color Persona

assisted by
Matthew Waldman, Masa Inakage

Part of final research at Keio Graduate School of Media Design



Growing up, we experience different things based on our cultural background, spoken language, and environment. This phenomenon leads to different behaviors, perspectives, and responses toward things including how we perceive color and emotion. We react emotionally as well as cognitively to visual imagery which influences how we use the information presented to us and how we are affected by its presence in our visual environment.

Both emotion and color have led this research to be built based on the realm of color psychology and whether it has evolved over time. This research aims to introduce a tool to understand human emotions through color, discerning the influence of diverse cultural backgrounds in shaping individual perception. As the fundamentals of the concept design, two theories were combined. First, the color and visual theory by artist Josef Albers and second, the basic human emotion theory by psychologist Paul Ekman.



The combination of both theories created the concept design as a tool to introduce an alternative approach to understanding basic human emotion by employing a personalized color visualization. The concept design features a template of squares with six layers for each emotion that will be represented with colors chosen by the individual.  The six emotions have to be put in order from the most dominating emotion being on the bigger square to the least dominating emotion on the smallest square.


The concept design was implemented in a public event in Tokyo with 55 participants from different nationalities and backgrounds. The result created a beautifully diverse output. All are created based on the individual’s perception of their own emotion, translated into color. While some of them might look similar, none of them is exactly the same.

This research shows how color can’t be treated as a one singular universal language. While the current existing color psychology are defining individual perception based on language and culture, this research made contribution to the work where it shows that individual perception of color also very much influenced by how one is preceiving themselves, taking color as part of their individual identity.



Looking into further possibilities for the design leads to the idea of having the concept in a broader approach. It is to have the Color Persona as a medium to not only discover emotion for a one-time experiment but also to have it as a digital emotion journal.

DOWNLOAD THE COMPLETE thesis (PDF)


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