If It's Purple, Someone's Gonna Die: The Power of Color in Visual Storytelling

Color and Culture

With their large pools of international students, the School of Visual Arts in New York, California State University at Los Angeles, and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles afforded me, as a faculty member, the opportunity to explore cultural similarities and differences in response to color. I discovered that while students’ individual stylistic approaches to color might indeed be different in character, their primary response was instinctual and similar. That is to say, the students tended to choose the same kinds of colors to express the same emotions.

To verify this, I recently invited former students of mine from different countries to participate in this experiment. First, by a vote, the participants selected two ...