By Jude Stewart
International color palettes should not only prevent blunders, but also exploit the rich associations different cultures “read” into every shade.
Color is universal—until, of course, it’s suddenly not. Negotiating color’s surprisingly divergent meanings across cultures can juice up an international design project’s expressive force—or it can spawn flat-footed blunders. Cataloging international brand misfires is a gossipy parlor game among marketers and designers, and the web is thick with classic tales of brand mistakes. Most of these revolve around faulty translations, like the Chevy Nova (No va, “it doesn’t go” in Spanish) and Nike Air’s “flaming air” logo, which accidentally—and sacrilegiously—resembled the word Allah as written in Arabic. But wrong-headed uses of color in international branding occupy their own niche. Some favorites: UPS had to repaint its trucks in Spain because their brown coloring was uncomfortably reminiscent of Spanish hearses. In Germany, UPS workers clad in brown uniforms sparked a local panic, as systemized brown-shirt-wearing in that country was outlawed in 1945 because of the Nazi brown-shirt brigade. A 1990s-era Pepsodent toothpaste campaign in Southeast Asia touted the product’s tooth-whitening powers, failing to reckon with a regional habit of chewing betel nuts to attractively blacken the teeth.
Clearly it behooves designers to research their color choices for international projects to navigate the don’ts successfully. But I’d take this argument a step further. Educating yourself about cross-cultural color isn’t merely about side-stepping mistakes. Westernization has eroded many traditional color taboos, as in Asia, where white wedding dresses have become more common despite the fact that white has long symbolized mourning. Worry less about mistakes and more about missed opportunities. A smarter sense of international color can inform your eye, urge you down fresh creative avenues and enrich the visual language you employ in your project with extra layers of connotations you hadn’t dreamed of.
In my book ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color, I wanted to exhilarate color fans of every kind with the surprising, often contradictory meanings lurking within every color of the rainbow, but I particularly had designers’ quandaries in mind. Every new design project makes you reach back into that same finite universe of color shades, seeking a fresh combination for your project. Your cross-cultural color palettes should help you to not only avoid obvious blunders, but also dig deeper into the rich array of associations that individual cultures may read into a given shade.
Take blue, the number one favorite color in countries across the globe, according to a 2004 joint study by Cheskin, MSI-ITM and CMCD Visual Symbols Library. Blue similarly dominates global branding: fully 23 percent of Interbrand’s top 100 brands for 2013 featured exclusively blue logos. Add in logos using blue plus other colors, that percentage rises to 32 percent. Yet even trusty, staid blue can communicate a surprising range of meanings. When Germans “make blue” (blau machen), they mean they’re playing hooky. The saying arises from medieval printers’ practice of taking the day off after a big project involving blue ink, which oxidized during the extra day of drying, improving its durability. (How printers passed that idle time might be inferred from the German expression “to be blue,” blau sein: to get drunk.) In Russia, navy blue and sky blue are considered wholly separate colors, as different to their eyes as red and orange are to ours. That distinction extends to sexual orientation: “sky blue” is shorthand for gay men, a useful fact to know while designing to appeal to Russian guys. The cornflower-blue shade of Gauloise cigarettes happens to match the blue uniforms of Parisian meter maids, a shade evoking both the jaded elegance of a French exhale and the irritation of parking tickets. Other meanings accreting to blue include its emerging use for eco-friendly products, now that we’ve collectively exhausted green.
Speaking of green: only 3 of the top 100 global brand logos featured this color in Interbrand’s 2013 survey, yet green offers richly multivalent meanings for designers who wield it correctly. Most Westernizers rightly think of red as China’s preferred auspicious color, but Chinese advertising is already super-saturated with red. How to stand out? A worthy answer might be to consider green. One of the country’s most prominent brands, China Life Insurance Company, sports an unusual, predominantly green logo. Confucius famously listed ten virtues he saw in the milky-green shade of jade. As long as your Chinese campaign doesn’t include men wearing green hats—in Chinese, “to wear a green hat” sounds identical to the phrase “to be cuckolded”—green offers a literally verdant range of possibilities in Asian contexts. That said, financial brands should heed the counterintuitive—to the United States—Chinese practice of color-coding stock price movements: over there, green means falling prices, red rising.
Similarly, most Westerners fail to recognize green as the color of Islam. According to the Koran, believers in Allah stroll in paradise wearing green silk robes, and souls of the faithful fly to their reward as green birds. Not only does lore suggest Muhammad wore a green turban, in an oft-cited hadith he singles out green among the few, pure earthly delights: “Three things of this world are acceptable: water, greenery and a beautiful face.” Young protesters in Arab Spring movements around the globe clad themselves in green, claiming for their cause the color of divinity and rightness.
Let’s close with a lightning round focused on a highly misunderstood color: black. In its inky depths we Westerners see, variously, evil, the void or a cool sophistication. The rest of the world sees these things, too, but also quite a bit more. The Uruk people in present-day Iraq see in black both fecundity and arable land—an association that makes good sense for desert dwellers. In northwestern Africa, brides don a black dress after seven days of marriage. The color of fertile soil, this garment evokes both her personal transformation and her dreams for an abundant family. Scandinavians go black with jealousy; the Finns call extreme jealousy mustasukkainen, “with black socks,” as if the envy curled biliously into one’s toes. Even Arthurian legend refuses to characterize the black knight as a clear-cut bad guy. Rather, this enigmatic figure is usually a nobleman fighting for justice incognito; Johnny Cash would thoroughly approve.
What are the colors of speed, gullibility, splurging? Cast your eye around the globe, and the answers may both surprise and delight you. Take your next international foray as an excuse to brush up on cross-cultural color. The rainbow is bright and brimming with more than you’d ever imagined. ca
Poster from the 2012 Speechless campaign, designed by DDB Lagos. The Speechless campaign invited Nigerian girls to speak their minds in an online forum. The black hijab indicates Islamic modesty, but in western Africa black also suggests fecundity: brides wear dresses the color of wet fertile soil after seven days of marriage, signifying their transformation and readiness for children. Here, black denotes a different fecundity: girls as participants in the world of ideas.
Color is universal—until, of course, it’s suddenly not. Negotiating color’s surprisingly divergent meanings across cultures can juice up an international design project’s expressive force—or it can spawn flat-footed blunders. Cataloging international brand misfires is a gossipy parlor game among marketers and designers, and the web is thick with classic tales of brand mistakes. Most of these revolve around faulty translations, like the Chevy Nova (No va, “it doesn’t go” in Spanish) and Nike Air’s “flaming air” logo, which accidentally—and sacrilegiously—resembled the word Allah as written in Arabic. But wrong-headed uses of color in international branding occupy their own niche. Some favorites: UPS had to repaint its trucks in Spain because their brown coloring was uncomfortably reminiscent of Spanish hearses. In Germany, UPS workers clad in brown uniforms sparked a local panic, as systemized brown-shirt-wearing in that country was outlawed in 1945 because of the Nazi brown-shirt brigade. A 1990s-era Pepsodent toothpaste campaign in Southeast Asia touted the product’s tooth-whitening powers, failing to reckon with a regional habit of chewing betel nuts to attractively blacken the teeth.
Clearly it behooves designers to research their color choices for international projects to navigate the don’ts successfully. But I’d take this argument a step further. Educating yourself about cross-cultural color isn’t merely about side-stepping mistakes. Westernization has eroded many traditional color taboos, as in Asia, where white wedding dresses have become more common despite the fact that white has long symbolized mourning. Worry less about mistakes and more about missed opportunities. A smarter sense of international color can inform your eye, urge you down fresh creative avenues and enrich the visual language you employ in your project with extra layers of connotations you hadn’t dreamed of.
In my book ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color, I wanted to exhilarate color fans of every kind with the surprising, often contradictory meanings lurking within every color of the rainbow, but I particularly had designers’ quandaries in mind. Every new design project makes you reach back into that same finite universe of color shades, seeking a fresh combination for your project. Your cross-cultural color palettes should help you to not only avoid obvious blunders, but also dig deeper into the rich array of associations that individual cultures may read into a given shade.
Take blue, the number one favorite color in countries across the globe, according to a 2004 joint study by Cheskin, MSI-ITM and CMCD Visual Symbols Library. Blue similarly dominates global branding: fully 23 percent of Interbrand’s top 100 brands for 2013 featured exclusively blue logos. Add in logos using blue plus other colors, that percentage rises to 32 percent. Yet even trusty, staid blue can communicate a surprising range of meanings. When Germans “make blue” (blau machen), they mean they’re playing hooky. The saying arises from medieval printers’ practice of taking the day off after a big project involving blue ink, which oxidized during the extra day of drying, improving its durability. (How printers passed that idle time might be inferred from the German expression “to be blue,” blau sein: to get drunk.) In Russia, navy blue and sky blue are considered wholly separate colors, as different to their eyes as red and orange are to ours. That distinction extends to sexual orientation: “sky blue” is shorthand for gay men, a useful fact to know while designing to appeal to Russian guys. The cornflower-blue shade of Gauloise cigarettes happens to match the blue uniforms of Parisian meter maids, a shade evoking both the jaded elegance of a French exhale and the irritation of parking tickets. Other meanings accreting to blue include its emerging use for eco-friendly products, now that we’ve collectively exhausted green.
Speaking of green: only 3 of the top 100 global brand logos featured this color in Interbrand’s 2013 survey, yet green offers richly multivalent meanings for designers who wield it correctly. Most Westernizers rightly think of red as China’s preferred auspicious color, but Chinese advertising is already super-saturated with red. How to stand out? A worthy answer might be to consider green. One of the country’s most prominent brands, China Life Insurance Company, sports an unusual, predominantly green logo. Confucius famously listed ten virtues he saw in the milky-green shade of jade. As long as your Chinese campaign doesn’t include men wearing green hats—in Chinese, “to wear a green hat” sounds identical to the phrase “to be cuckolded”—green offers a literally verdant range of possibilities in Asian contexts. That said, financial brands should heed the counterintuitive—to the United States—Chinese practice of color-coding stock price movements: over there, green means falling prices, red rising.
Similarly, most Westerners fail to recognize green as the color of Islam. According to the Koran, believers in Allah stroll in paradise wearing green silk robes, and souls of the faithful fly to their reward as green birds. Not only does lore suggest Muhammad wore a green turban, in an oft-cited hadith he singles out green among the few, pure earthly delights: “Three things of this world are acceptable: water, greenery and a beautiful face.” Young protesters in Arab Spring movements around the globe clad themselves in green, claiming for their cause the color of divinity and rightness.
Let’s close with a lightning round focused on a highly misunderstood color: black. In its inky depths we Westerners see, variously, evil, the void or a cool sophistication. The rest of the world sees these things, too, but also quite a bit more. The Uruk people in present-day Iraq see in black both fecundity and arable land—an association that makes good sense for desert dwellers. In northwestern Africa, brides don a black dress after seven days of marriage. The color of fertile soil, this garment evokes both her personal transformation and her dreams for an abundant family. Scandinavians go black with jealousy; the Finns call extreme jealousy mustasukkainen, “with black socks,” as if the envy curled biliously into one’s toes. Even Arthurian legend refuses to characterize the black knight as a clear-cut bad guy. Rather, this enigmatic figure is usually a nobleman fighting for justice incognito; Johnny Cash would thoroughly approve.
What are the colors of speed, gullibility, splurging? Cast your eye around the globe, and the answers may both surprise and delight you. Take your next international foray as an excuse to brush up on cross-cultural color. The rainbow is bright and brimming with more than you’d ever imagined. ca
Poster from the 2012 Speechless campaign, designed by DDB Lagos. The Speechless campaign invited Nigerian girls to speak their minds in an online forum. The black hijab indicates Islamic modesty, but in western Africa black also suggests fecundity: brides wear dresses the color of wet fertile soil after seven days of marriage, signifying their transformation and readiness for children. Here, black denotes a different fecundity: girls as participants in the world of ideas.
Jude Stewart has authored two books and written about design and culture for the Atlantic, Slate, Fast Company and the Believer.
