Sun on the skin

Is blue always cool, yellow always sunny, green always vegetal? Can't blue also evoke a sense of timelessness, green suggest the depths of the sea or Ireland at night, and yellow appear aggressive or evoke a chime of bells? In his new book, Moritz Zwimpfer gathers these and other free associations of budding design students with various colors. The mental and emotional makeup of each viewer triggers very different reactions, and thus the compilation of linguistic attributions eludes unambiguousness, just as a color cannot be described precisely in words. The subjective and emotional component retains the final say here, and so the same pink can be considered provocative, sterile, beautiful, intense, crazy, provocative—or simply embody jazz.