An Examination of the Color Image Scale for Contemporary American Culture: Phase One of A Multiphase Approach

ABSTRACT Semantic color association is a nuanced process shaped by factors such as context, culture, and individual demographics. Designers invest significant effort in selecting color palettes that evoke intended emotional responses and resonate with their target audience. One widely used framework in design education and industry is the Color Image Scale (CIS), developed by Shigenobu Kobayashi in 1989. Grounded in a Japanese cultural context, CIS organizes color palettes along three perceptual axes—warm–cool (hue), soft–hard (tone), and clear–grayish (chroma)—and associates these with emotional adjectives. While influential, the CIS was based initially on a constrained sampling of Japanese participants, raising questions about its applicability to other cultural settings. This study aims to test and adapt Kobayashi's CIS framework within a North American cultural context situated within the United States through a multiphase research approach. Specifically, we examine how contemporary United States designers and non‐designers interpret color‐semantic associations compared to the original Japanese dataset. To this end, the researchers developed an online survey to gather insights on word associations by collecting responses to single‐hue and three‐hue color palette samples. The findings provide insight into culturally situated semantic color associations and demonstrate meaningful differences between the original CIS model in semantic alignment across demographics and professional backgrounds. This research contributes to the cross‐cultural validation of the CIS and lays the groundwork for developing updated tools that reflect the semantic and aesthetic preferences of American audiences situated in the United States.