I carried out some primary research around colour association by asking people to fill out a quick survey. I asked each person what they associated with each colour; this could've been a thing, feeling, memory, person, place, emotion, anything that they thought of. I received 89 responses in total. I tallied up the answers below so that I could clearly see the results. Most colours had at least one thing that lots of people associated it with, but I found that the answers varied a lot. Some answers were incredibly specific and were obviously inspired by the respondee's personal life, while some were much more generic and universal. The survey confirmed my beliefs that while each colour often has a common association, most of the time, our answers are shaped by our personal experiences, meaning that most people will have different and unique answers.
This is why some of my digital text pieces feature certain colours - because of the popular associations - but some just have colours I like or felt like using, because they didn't have any obvious connotations to me.
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