Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia

Inspiration

Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia

Have you ever felt that letters and numbers imply certain colours, almost like an aura or personality, that come to mind when you think about them? This phenomenon, whereby the comprehension of aesthetically-neutral semantic units is accompanied by corresponding hues, is called grapheme-colour synaesthesia. It’s experienced by a portion of the population, though the exact percentage has yet to be determined.

As designers, we often need to derive aesthetic interest from relatively plain subject matter, so it’s almost as if grapheme-colour synaesthesia is performing a similar duty in the subconscious mind toward otherwise-colourless, purely-functional visual elements. Our own Alexander is one such synaesthete, and he’s created this typographic representation of every letter and single-digit number with the corresponding colours that they conjure in his mind.

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