I thought I would share why I am so interested in color & color psychology and how I got to this point in my journey. It has been an overlapping of different influences and information that led me to create a groundbreaking system that distills the four seasons into 12 individual months. The more I learned and understood, the more evident the distillation became to me because of my orderly and dyslexic mind.
Color psychology is a vast subject that is typically mainstreamed in terms of ‘red is warm and advances’ and ‘blue is cool and recedes’. It is said there are 7,000,000 colors the human eye can differentiate, so it would be expected there is far more complexity and nuance to this extremely influential subject then first meets the eye.
Having been drawn to interior design from a very early age, I have been acutely aware of color the majority of my life; a color connoisseur if you like. It is what I see before anything else. It is mysterious, captivating and changeable, yet ever present and foundational. With all that I have learned, a progression in my perception grew as well, ultimately leading me to create my ‘seasonal monthly moodboards’.
My fascination with color psychology, in connection with the seasons, began in the early eighties with the book ‘Color Me Beautiful’ which defines a persons best color palette (for fashion) into nature’s four seasons. I loved the orderly idea of it, but could never fit myself into one of the four seasons neatly. I always felt I landed somewhere between summer and autumn and that there was a nuance missing to the categorizing of it all. The seasons seemed to be too sharply defined, but as time passed I didn’t really think much more about it. In the companion book ‘Your Colors at Home’ (released in 1985), I found it so interesting how home furnishings could be aligned into seasons as well. The book itself however was ‘underwhelming’ from a visual standpoint so it fell to the back of my mind after some time as well.
Over the years that followed I continued to read and collect many books on color. In 1992 I bought ‘Tricia Guild on Colour’, shortly followed by her 1994 book ‘Painted Country’. Both bursting with expressive color use and her signature ‘ahead of the curve’ approach. A few years later I borrowed ‘Color Therapy at Home’ from my local library after hearing the term ‘color therapy’ on television, as well as ‘The Complete Book of Color’. Others added to my collection were Judith Miller’s ‘Color’ (2000) and Caroline Cliftton-Mogg’s ‘The Color Design Source Book’ (2001).
But it was not until I took a ‘Blogging Your Way’ class from Holly Becker; which introduced me to the lovely Fiona Humberstone (as one of our teachers) that I heard the term ‘seasonal color psychology’ and the qualities depicted for each season. I was utterly fascinated and it brought back all the learning I had stored away and collected over the years and connected it together. Fiona had learned this theory/system earlier while attending a course by Angela Wright. I immediately purchased and read Angela’s book ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Color Psychology’ (released 1995). I have subsequently purchased every book on the subject I could find to refine my knowledge more deeply. At last count I have nearly forty books on color. It is hard to express how fascinated I am with this subject and how overarching it’s impact can be.
The more I learned however, the more I could see the four seasons branching out into twelve months, as this would give more definition and clarity to the subject. It also became increasingly evident that each month’s own qualities could be used to categorize, describe and depict far more then just color, or feelings; I could see them relate to furniture, artwork, architecture, landscaping, furnishings, fashion, lighting, flowers and florals, music, typeface, surface pattern, graphics and branding, as well as a myriad of other subjects.
I love how this subject relates to each individual, as I believe we are inherently wired to be drawn to certain colors and surroundings. It creates a clear construct and framework to build a foundation on, clarifying what we are truly drawn to and why. This helps clear the ‘inspiration overload’ so many of us get trapped in.
It is an unbiased, objective outlook that creates clarity and focus for why we are drawn intuitively to certain visuals and shudder at others. There are no wrong or right seasons or months. Trends continually follow different styles and color tones, often depending on the economic and social outlook of people collectively, not as individuals, which is why trends never last.
What does last is an elevated visual of what we are drawn to and how it can give us confidence, save time, preserve resources and harness direction.
