09/25/2026
Colors communicate.
They speak to each other. They speak to the people in the room. And we’re responding whether we realize it or not.
Color psychology is often reduced to12 colors on a color wheel. Red does this. Blue does that. Yellow makes babies cry (my favorite urban legend of color).
But color is far more dimensional than that. Literally and figuratively.
Once I was bitten by the color measurement bug, I was obsessed. But I’ve always been equally invested in something else: human-supportive color strategy in the built world.
That’s why Iris is capable of conversations about color that go beyond notation. She’s an AI Color Intelligence System. She had to be, because a standard AI agent isn’t enough for the way color works. If you’ve tried getting a regular AI to do color stuff, you know exactly what that means.
Iris considers where a color sits in the visible spectrum, but she also understands light and dark, vivid and muted, soft and chromatic, warm and cool -- and the different kinds of energy those characteristics contribute to mood and atmosphere.
This part of Iris isn’t new territory for me. Years ago (2013), I wrote and illustrated Color Secrets Unlocked, exploring the finer nuances of what tints, tones and shades communicate -- and how we process those differences.
Iris is the evolution of that work.
The words you see at the bottom of these screenshots are part of Iris’s expanding color cognition vocabulary.
Warm. Bold. Quiet. Vivid. Muted. Dynamic. Soft. Grounded.
They help her talk about color and enhance what measurement alone can tell her.
Because color can influence, inform and persuade. It can affect what we notice, how we experience a room and how we respond to the things around us -- consciously, unconsciously and subconsciously.
And Iris has more to say about some colors than others right now.
That’s something we’re actively working on: making her vocabulary more balanced, robust and informative across the full spectrum.
The science tells Iris what the color is.
Her expanding vocabulary helps her talk about what a color communicates.
