DESIGN FOR FUN
Explain things and tell great stories
What Color is Your Name?
The Synesthesia Project at Synesthesia.me
In January 2020 I officially launched a site to help people understand the phenomena of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a crossing of two or more senses, and it occurs in about 4% of the population. The most common form, grapheme-color synesthesia, causes people to associate specific colors with letters and numbers, and those associations are entirely unique.
I created a gallery site to show my friends how my mind interprets letters and numbers as blocks of color. A good friend put together a javascript app to create an interactive web app. I wrote an article explaining the project on Medium, and it was picked up by Elemental and distributed widely. The project went viral and was featured in more than 50 news around the world, including Better Homes & Gardens, Apartment Therapy, Discover.com, Voice of America Russia, Business Insider and CBS New York. To date, more than 2.3 million unique visitors have come to the site.
Links:
What Color is Your Name - www.synesthesia.me
Medium - Articles I wrote explaining the project
Etsy - I monetized the tool by selling custom name portraits
Synesthesia.Me App
Very much a work in progress, but in my free time I am developing an app concept for people with Grapheme-Color Synesthesia.
The problem: It’s very hard for people with synesthesia to explain what they are experiencing to those who do not have synesthesia.
The solution: Develop an app that allows synesthetes to show their colors to the world. The app would provide a visual generator of letters in their specific colors, and then use that profile of colors to make sharable name portraits, assign color name portraits to contacts, or just have a way of showing what they mean when they say, “Yeah, B is totally blue.”
