#WorldsFavouriteColour: Westaway, Watson, Treggiden

Colour is one of the earliest mediums we learn to play with. As children we pick favourites and build emotional relationships with inanimate objects drenched in our favoured shades. As we grow older those who go on to work in creative fields often find their style and taste is defined by palettes of colour and the use of specific hues. We asked industry-leading creatives Adrian Westaway (co-founder of invention agency Special Projects), Stack Magazines founder Steven Watson, and design industry commentator Katie Treggiden to share their tonal tales as part of G . F Smith’s ongoing mission to find the world’s favourite colour. 

It’s a sort of blue, and I associate it with the jumpers I had to wear at school every single day. I thought I’d end up hating it after having to wear it so much, but to tell you the truth I can’t live without it.

It makes me think of light, floating around, bouncing off things and picking up little bits of colour before dropping them somewhere else.

I grew up in the middle east and my first memory of colour is that of sand. Although, because I’ve seen so many family photos of it since, it’s a Kodachrome 64 version of sand, with a deep red/orange tone to it.

It changes all the time, but just now with Spring around the corner I’ll go for bright yellow. 

Resisting the temptation to Google it, I think it’s something to do with photons hitting electrons. 

This is hard! I’ll go for the pale grey sky over East Yorkshire throughout the 1980s and 90s. I went back last weekend and it seems much more blue now.

I rarely wear anything other than grey, white and navy or royal blue, but the colour I love the most is a warm, sunny yellow. There is an uplifting, summery freedom about that colour – and in fact my Swedish raincoat is exactly that colour, because that's exactly what you need on a rainy British winter's day! It's also littered throughout my house in combination with grey, and right now I love it in contrast with pastel pink. 

As a writer, I'm fascinated by words – the word “colour” has many different meanings – it can relate to hue as in this context; it can mean embarrassment when used to refer to someone blushing; when you talk about "adding colour" to something, often you mean adding interest or variation rather than literally adding colour; and finally it can be a particularly loaded word relating to race, that has very different implications depending on how it's used. All that in one word – you've got to love the English language! 

Someone once told me that I love grey so much because I spent the first two weeks of my life in an incubator in intensive care surrounded by grey machinery, which I'm quite sure is nonsense! That said, I do have a very early memory of the blue gingham curtains that were in my bedroom as a baby – and blue is still a favourite. 

Visit worldsfavouritecolour.com to share yours.

#GFSmith #WorldsFavouriteColour