The Colors of Mental Health
For thousands of years, ancient civilizations assigned symbolic, emotional, and spiritual meanings to color, but are those universal or a subjective experience?
Cláudia Marques
Visual Designer
When I started working at The Human Aspect as a designer, I came in to translate mental health challenges into visual metaphors. The goal was to provide an alternative and inclusive way for our audience to learn about mental health topics, which we still do today.
In the process of creating and developing an illustration system, an important branding component needed to be defined: a new color system. But to explain the process of choosing colors, we first need to understand how it impact us.
Why is Color Important?
Color influences our human experience through interactions between biology, cognition, and cultural learning.
Color shapes how we navigate, interpret, and emotionally respond to the world around us. Our brain categorises colors into emotionally meaningful patterns. Over time, repeated exposure to color-emotion associations reinforces automatic responses.
This matters especially in mental-health communication:
Color can act almost like a language within the nervous system, activating thoughts and feelings before a single word is read.
One of the earliest formal explorations of color theory came from the German poet, artist, and politician Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Cultural traditions assign symbolic meanings to colors, influencing how different communities interpret events such as mourning or celebration. Although these interpretations vary across societies, they demonstrate a universal
human tendency to attach psychological meaning to colour.
Colours are forces, radiant energies that affect us positively or negatively whether we are aware of it or not (Itten, 1970)
But can we feel color?
Understanding how colors link to emotions has a long history. Already Aristotle (384–322 BCE) wrote that colors have affective powers.
A systematic review found "systematic correspondences between color categories and emotions."
For instance, RED was linked to positive and negative, arousing, and high power emotions (e.g., love, happiness, excitement, passion, anger, rage, fury, hostility, hate). YELLOW and ORANGE were linked to positive and high arousal emotions (e.g., happiness, pleasure, fun, excitement, surprise). GREEN, BLUE, and BLUE-GREEN were linked to mainly positive, low arousal (i.e., calming) emotions (e.g., comfort, happiness, relaxation), but note that BLUE was also linked to sadness and GREEN to envy/jealousy in some studies. PINK was largely positive (e.g., love, fun, happiness), while PURPLE corresponded to some but not all empowering emotions (e.g., pride, relaxation, love, fear, power). WHITE was largely linked to positive and low arousal emotions (e.g., happiness, relaxation, relief, hope) while GREY and BLACK carried negative connotations, with GREY being more frequently linked to low power and low arousal (e.g., fear, disappointment, regret, tiredness, boredom), and BLACK to high power emotions (e.g., fear, evil, hate, anger).
Color perception is subjective because it relies on individual biology and brain interpretation. Yet nature provides an objective, universal foundation.
Color perception is believed to be rooted in evolutionary adaptation, allowing early humans to distinguish threats, identify resources, and interpret environmental cues. For instance, the color red may have evolved to signal danger or heightened emotion, contributing to its modern association with arousal and alertness. Similarly, green and blue may reflect environments rich in water and vegetation, evoking feelings of calmness and safety.
Color meanings are fixed or universal, they are shaped by culture, personal experience, lightness, saturation, and context. But nature gives colour a shared starting point. The Human Aspect’s purpose: making mental-health stories feel human, hopeful, and possible to approach. That created a natural emotional journey that we wanted people to experience while interacting with The Human Aspect.
A palette drawn from nature
The final palette followed a simple logic:
Colour | Natural reference | Role in the brand |
Blue | Water, lake | Stability, calm, reflection |
Purple | Twilight, dusk, transitional light | Emotional depth, imagination |
Green | Leaves, forests, new growth | Hope, recovery, renewal |
Orange | Sunrise, sunset, ripe fruit, firelight | Warmth, energy, connection |
Yellow | Sunlight, flowers, ripe fruit | Optimism, clarity, attention |
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