How do we organize, structure, and differentiate between shades of color? What process did Pantone go through to name their color 15-3919 “Serenity?” From categorizing them based on words associated with visual, geographical, emotional, and experiential descriptions, the goal for this project was to explore the structure, hierarchy, subjectivity, and semantics of naming and categorizing colors the way we do.

This project features a browser/web-based game built using Twine and used to survey and collect data on how the user picks a name for a distinct color following a naming system composed of six descriptive categories. Through user testing and data collection these names were analyzed to see if there are any overarching trends in the way we approach naming colors. Ultimately the scope of this project is to delve deeper into structural modeling of information architecture, interaction design, colorimetry, and onomastics as a means to facilitate the question of how do we name and assign a value to a color.