Colour

Hues and Shades

Colour is oftentimes the first element registered in the recognition of something, particularly in cases of brief exposure (Witzel and Gegenfurtner, 2018), like when one glances at storefronts while walking down the street. Pre-19th century periods saw colour production being constrained by resource availability, cost and durability of pigments—which gave various colours associations of scarcity. Modern technologies enable access to a wide and relatively standardised spectrum of colour on the printed storefront; despite this, colour still operates as a signifier loaded with historical and cultural meanings that gets decoded by consumers, regardless of the designer’s conscious intent.

[Click on each image for a closer look]

Figure 2. Storefronts mapped across a colour wheel (excluding predominantly black or white storefronts). Clusters of Asian and Western cuisine locales can largely be split into the warm and cool sides of the colour wheel respectively. Interestingly, 56% of the yellow-red cluster food locales serve Asian cuisine and 69% of the blue-green cluster ones serve Western cuisine (an additional 15% in the latter cluster serving Asian cuisine but adopting Western aesthetics on their storefront).

Starting the analysis from a basic colour wheel of hues and shades, the storefronts are sorted based on their most prominent colour. There is no obvious trend relating to the cost of dining from figure 2, but a trend emerges in two clusters in the yellow-red and green-blue areas, which are notably on opposite sides of the chart. Warm colours invite attention and quick engagement, often being utilised and associated with casual dining spots, while cool colours are often linked with calmness, health, quality, and sophistication (Peek, 2017). Interestingly, 56% of the yellow-red cluster food locales serve Asian cuisine and 69% of the blue-green cluster ones serve Western cuisine (an additional 15% in the latter cluster serving Asian cuisine but adopting Western aesthetics on their storefront).

Figure 3. Lineup of some of the Asian cuisine storefronts located in the yellow-red cluster.

Figure 4. Mcdonald’s signage, showcasing their brand colours.

Seen in figure 3, Asian cuisine storefronts gather in the yellow-red region and are specifically of Eastern and Southern origin. These warm colours carry meanings symbolic to their respective cultures; red is often associated with good fortune and ceremonial auspiciousness in China and India, orange signifies spirituality and purity in South Asian religious traditions, and yellow is linked to royalty and harmony across Chinese and Indian rituals (Zhou and Taylor, 2018) (Galustyan and Papchenko, 2015). From the western perception, these colours’ associations with fast food began with the success of Mcdonald’s (figure 4)—where the brand’s choice of colours came from their energetic and approachable qualities (Cutolo, 2022). Two-thirds of the documented franchise fast food locales make up a quarter of this category, demonstrating how fast food chains followed in Mcdonald’s footsteps with similar palettes (Bannarasee, 2024). The marketing convention becomes self-reinforcing and strengthens the warm colour’s significations of convenience, affordability, and subsequent lower-class positioning. This potentially influences the class perceptions of Asian stores that adopt these colours for unrelated reasons.

Figure 5. Lineup of some of the Western cuisine storefronts located in the green-blue cluster

Figure 6. The Virgin in Prayer, painted in 1640–1650 by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato

While the East and South Asian relations to warm tones stand as active choices made to signify cultural symbolism, Western ties with cool tones (figure 5) can be argued to be more of a passive choice subconsciously informed by European history. An example is deep blue’s association with wealth, a relationship that dates back to Renaissance art. Ultramarine was a rare pigment as valuable as gold in 15th century Europe due to its production process (Plesters, 1966). As seen in figure 6, the pigment is recognisable in its usage to paint the Virgin Mary’s robes during the Renaissance period—imbuing holy and sacred qualities onto the colour. Residing in the same colour family, navy blue’s name has its former half originating from the British Royal Navy (Oxford English Dictionary, 2024), where their uniforms’ dominant colour has become synonymous with the military force’s associations with rationality and institutional power. It would not be a far-cry to state that the colour’s symbolism permeates most cultures due to the British maritime empire’s global prominence spread through colonialism. Furthermore, the production of indigo dyes that made navy blue possible was itself deeply entangled with colonial economies, particularly through plantation cultivation in colonies where labour was exploited (Yale Center for British Art, 2019). Power becomes linked to the upper-class; it’s unlikely that storefront designers intend for their choices to signify Catholic, militant-imperialist, or colonial slavery ideas—yet, this latent and subsequently high-class signification lingers in modern culture.

These trends in colour start to establish a relationship between ethnic cultures and class divisions. Regardless of intention behind colour choice across cuisines, colour functions as a historically-loaded signifier of class when read through dominant frameworks of visual perception shaped by colonial legacies and Eurocentricity. Their ability to override culturally-specific colour codes is debatable, but this potential to re-inscribe hierarchies of taste within our perceptions nonetheless exists.

[more coming soon]