Colour Emotion (British style)

I found this website about colour emotion. The reason I spelled it like that is because this is a British site. Interesting... this is either the second or third website based out of the UK I have blogged about.

Color emotion is the relationship between color and the viewer's psychological responses. "Warm" is not a real emotion term, but a semantic term for describing the association between colour and temperature. Colour emotion concerns human emotions evoked when seeing colours. "Emotion terms" are those for describing human emotions such as excitement, happiness and anxiety.

Here are some different color emotion theories:

J. W. Goethe developed a colour harmony theory on the basis of his hue circle. In this circle, colours are categorised into two sides, the positive and the negative. The former includes yellow, reddish yellow and yellowish red; the latter includes blue, reddish blue and bluish red.

M. E. Chevreul's theories on colour harmony are based on his colour circle of 64 hues derived from three primary hues: yellow, red and blue.

Ostwald's system is particularly favoured by artists and designers because of its superficial similarity of construction to the way artists mix their paints on the palette.

Munsell's colours in this system are arranged such that the perceptual difference between any two neighbouring colours is nearly constant in each of the three dimensions, Munsell Hue, Munsell Value and Munsell Chroma.

P. Moon and D. E. Spencer proposed a quantitative model of colour harmony, using predictors "colour interval" P. Moon and D. E. Spencer proposed a quantitative model of colour harmony, using predictors "colour interval".

The central idea behind J. Itten's colour harmony theories is that "two or more colours are mutually harmonious if their mixture yields a neutral grey."

The Coloroid system was developed by A. Nemcsics for use in colour design. The aim of the system is to create aesthetic uniformity of a colour space.

The NCS (Natural Colour System) was developed by T. Johansson and S. Hesselgren and, more recently, by A. Hård and L. Sivik. In the NCS, colours are specified in terms of the relative amount of four elementary hues (red, green, yellow and blue) and of black and white.


Colour Appearance Attributes: Every colour has three basic characteristics: hue, lightness and chroma. These are sometimes referred to as the three colour appearance attributes. There are also other attributes used to describe colour appearance, such as brightness, colorfulness and saturation, and some of them are more useful than these three basic attributes in certain circumstances.

The CIE is an international commission of illumination and is responsible for international standards of photometry and colorimetry. The CIE system provides methods for specifying colour stimuli under controlled viewing conditions.

Here is the site... http://colour-emotion.co.uk/whats.html