I have been in the School of Design at the University of Leeds for over 21 years. Before that I worked in colour engineering. Before that in colour neuroscience. My first degree was in colour chemistry. So I have had a varied career but colour has been at the heart of it. I don’t think I thought too much about design as a discipline before joining Leeds. But your environment influences you, of course. Most of mu PhF students at Leeds have been design students. And I have taught on many undergraduate and postgraduate design programmes. So I picked up a few things along the way.

In the video below I run through some of the key concepts I have picked up around colour design, especially in the context of packaging and product design.

In this video I mention some work by my doctoral student Luewn Yu which I would like to expand upon a little here.

This is the paper

In this paper we showed people lots of products in lots of different colours and we asked which one they would prefer to buy. We also, at the end, asked what was their favourite colour. For each product we also asked to what extent did they think the product colour was functional.

What do we mean by functional? Well, it’s where the colour is more than decorative. Where, for example, in some products the colour might denote how strong a solution is or where it might suggest that a product smells or tastes this or that way.

Take the products below:

We might expect the middle on to smell of lemons for example. And maybe the right-hand one to smell of apples (though in this case it is neutral or original). And take the product below:

If it was darker green we might expect it to be stronger.

So for each product we have a measure of how likely the consumer is to choose the product in their preferred general colour (we call this product colour consistency rate) and we also have a measure of how functional the colour is (we call this colour performance/functionality). Our hypothesis was that people would choose a product in their favourite colour if there was no performance of functional implication of the colour. On the other hand, we thought that people would be less likely to choose a colour in their general preferred colour if colour is somehow important or has some other implication.

And that is what we and what the graph of our results below shows.

So all the blue dots represent different products. On the right you have products where the colour signifies something (such as washing up liquid or mouth wash) and on the left we have products where there is no meaning to the colour (such as a corkscrew or a pair of scissors).

As expected, for products on the left the product colour consistency rare is high; that is people tend to choose these products in their general favourite colour if given the choice. On the other hand, for products on the right the product colour consistency rare is low; that is, there is no consistency between the colour of the product that they pick and their general preferred colour. This allows us to predict quite well whether it makes sense for a product to be offered in lots of different colours or not.