Simplicity is the ultimate complexity – that was the reasoning behind Nameless Paints – a set of 10 paint tubes designed by Yusuke Imai and Ayami Moteki that replace color names with only visual colors. They look like this:

The thing is, most companies are opting for more and more creative and exotic color names (like ‘inchworm’ or ‘jazzberry jam’) – that seems like a fairly good way of advertising your colors, but is it actually helping? There’s a reasonable argument to be made for keeping color names as simple as possible, because we then tend to think about colors by their names, and not by how they actually look like.

“By not assigning names to the colors we want to expand the definition of what a color can be, and the various shades they can create by mixing them,” says Imai.

Personally, I’m pleasantly surprised by this design; it’s a different way of looking at colors – looking at the actual colors (and color combinations), not at the color names. I like it! Do you?

Enjoyed this article? Join 40,000+ subscribers to the ZME Science newsletter. Subscribe now!