The meaning behind green
About the color
With all of nature’s green bounty around us, it wasn’t an easy color for the first artists to replicate.
Neolithic people made ‘green’ from birch tree leaves, but it was really more of a muddy brown. The ancient Egyptians cleverly dyed clothes yellow (with saffron), and then blue (with woad) to make it green. In middle-age Europe, clothes were turned green with vegetal dyes, but they faded or changed in color after being washed or exposed to sunlight.
Thanks to this unstable nature, chameleon green became a color that was deemed deceptive. It became associated with games of chance, which is why card and billiard tables are still covered with green baize today.
And when in 1861, the US dollar bill turned green — the color ultimately became linked with money and greed. The green hex code is #008000.
| Type | Value |
|---|---|
| HEX | #008000 |
| RGB | 0, 128, 0 |
| CMYK | 1, 0, 1, 0.5 |
Application in design
You may have noticed that traditionally red fast-food chains are shifting their brand palettes to green and other natural colors to look ‘healthier’.
It’s not a coincidence. As the color of nature and environmentalism, green is universally used in modern design to represent fresh foods and organic products.
But green is genuinely an omnipresent color and it can help you to put many other insights into your visual content: prosperity, youth, health, and vitality.
