The Dewey Color System

I've always love, love, loved color. One of my favorite parts of being a designer is selecting colors to match the personality of the project. Maybe that's why my personal color preferences are so fickle... they're always changing to adapt to the colors that I'm currently working with.

A work, we're working on a branding project and my Art Director brought in Neenah Paper's promotional piece: Olive is not drab. (A particularly captivating title for me, as olive is creeping up in the ranking of my favorite colors) It is a beautifully constructed color manual based on The Dewey Color System, according to Neenah: "the world's only scientifically validated, color-based personality testing instrument."

While, they no longer have the "Olive is not drab." promotional piece available, they have converted some of the components to a web-based format.

There's a simple test based on the Dewey Color System to understand how the color preferences and combinations you select can reveal some shade of your personality. Mine?

Another, perhaps even more useful tool, is their Color Unleashed: "It's the first proven system that lets you explore the psychological meanings of color, ink and paper combinations." Pretty cool.