Why purple is AI’s colour
Purple is deeply embedded in our cultures. So why has it become the colour of choice with so many AI tools & brands?
It was in the wee hours, the house quiet, the room lit by the glow of my screens with several AI tools open and a few in tabs on my browser. Something interesting struck me. The dominance of the colour purple, sparkling icons and wands. Why are companies working at the leading edge AI tools, so intently rational, drawing so deeply from the visual language of magic?
The answer I think, may rest deep within our collective response to transformative power an technologies. One that stretches from ancient Phoenician purple dye traders to todays magicians of machine learning.
These design choices, from logos to UI buttons may be a subconscious form of creating what in anthropology is considered “technological charisma” — a way of building a relationship with Artificial Intelligence (AI) that encourages both adoption and experimentation while still providing a sense of magic and wonder.
Then there’s sociologist Emile Durkheim’s idea of “collective representations” — shared symbols that a society creates to help us understand new phenomena, including technologies. The consistency of the use of purple (a symbolic colour), wands, stars and…
