Research & Insights

By Stephanie Geerlings, May 13, 2010

Color Descriptions from TEDxDU


Lukas gave a presentation today at TEDxDU. It was a great event with more than 1,000 attendees.

At the beginning of his presentation he told the audience members if they were bored they could work on a CrowdFlower task. It turns out a lot of people were bored! The task was describing colors, but with a twist—describe the color as precisely as possible. You can see the task here.

So far, the most common color reported was a tie between “blue” and “Blue” both were reported 8 times. “purple” came up 7 times, “lavendar” 5, and “Purple” 5.

There are lots of approaches for naming colors – but the award has to go to the respondent who answered in hexidecimal “#F36F36”. Nice.

Some of the more interesting and long-winded colors descriptions are; “soft peach sunrise through smog, haze or volcanic ash”, “that deep green that everyone tries to describe as a forest, even though no forest is really that deep and vibrant”, and “tanned orange, the color of skin that many high school girls have when they hit the tanning booth too often.”

I’m pretty sure this answerer is from a photographer, “Dark grey or light black. Take true black and lghten it up about 3 or 4 stops.”

Then there is the poet’s response, “It is the smell of spring, the feel of a pulse and taste of a berry.”

We saw responses that were helped along with food or wildflowers; Pumpkin orange, Goldenrod, creamsicle orange. Creamsicles are food, yes?

We’ve created a little graph where the labels are colored by the value of the image we showed. Each label is the aggregate response for that color, and is sized by how many people chose that label when they saw the color.

Thank you for participating and please continue adding to a very important list. May your answers live alongside the esteemed answers; “Brown kind of yukkie yellowish brown”, “Mix of light beige and light green to make a puke brown”, and “Vibrant Utah Blue Sky against frozen red earth sand dunes”.