Analysis of relationships among color, word, and shape: evaluating its utility for the design process

Abstract

Designers create representations aesthetically pleasing that achieve a functional meaning. Color is one of key elements that plays an important role in design, both functionally and aesthetically. Thus, for designing color schemes, it would be important to understand the information associated with the color in order to create an expression that has functional meaning. To address this issue, we collected data on the association of color with words and shapes from more than 10,000 Japanese speakers by a series of multiple-choice questionnaires. Through a multivariate analysis, we were able to represent the association of words, shapes, and colors across several different semantic categories as a two-dimensional map reflecting its topological structure of the map. Using this result, we propose a method to generate linguistic expressions for color combinations by vector summation in a word2vec vector space and discuss its utility for design.