What color is your name?
Synesthesia is a condition where certain senses overlap. For example, you could smell colors, or see sounds!
Bernadette Sheridan has a type of synesthesia whereby letters and numbers appear as colors within her brain (grapheme-color synesthesia). She has created a lovely map of those colors so we can experience it as well.
What Color Is Your Name? allows you to type in your name and see the colors that it produces. It’s a wonderfully simple idea grounded in Bernadette’s reality.
Does name match your personality? It might, depending on what color it is. https://t.co/e4tFjZe0J3 pic.twitter.com/kdQWLFvlRz
— Bernadette Sheridan (@SynesthesiaMe) February 7, 2020
You may be surprised by what you find. For me, I’m a long combination of blues, with a yellow flair right at the end. You can play around with random names on the site, or browse the project’s Twitter account and see everyone sharing their colors!
This is such a beautiful exercise. Thank you, Bernadette Sheridan! @SynesthesiaMe pic.twitter.com/7LfaEWUKes
— Aimee Muirnin Dunne (@aimeeinstl) February 11, 2020
The project has done a fantastic job of raising awareness of the condition, and to boot, allows you buy a beautiful, clean print of whichever word you choose. Which can make for a wonderful and unique gift, as well as a perpetual talking point!
For those looking to dig into the topic more, Bernadette has written about it extensively on Medium. You can really start to imagine what it is like seeing words as colors.
The Wikipedia article on Synesthesia is also a great jumping-off point… it’s really amazing how little we actually know about our brains.