Some people wonder why Taipei’s color palette is what it is. Perhaps those lost art classes have stunted our imaginations, with the result that most signboards are printed using highly saturated primary colors. The conflicting and contrasting color systems in use around Taipei make it seem as if the entire city is arguing and shouting.

Ultimately, the origins of Taipei’s color scheme are unclear.

The Small Shop Signmaker program helps stores change their signage. A signboard incorporating a business’s “cultural DNA” can quietly express the shop’s essence while also fitting into its surroundings.

Reassessing color education

Agua Chou, founder of Agua Design and head of City Yeast, observes that for all that the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is an important Taipei landmark, the architecturally interesting white-and-blue hall has had virtually no impact on the look of the buildings in its Zhongzheng District neighborhood.

Other nations seem to take a more thematic approach to color. Thailand makes gorgeous use of gold and purple; Japan’s colors are soft and calm, like a quiet conversation with oneself; and Scandinavia incorporates hints of bright modern colors among its whites and wood tones.

The excess of color on Taipei’s streets numbs people to its use, and that’s before accounting for the city’s overuse of red, yellow, and black-and-yellow warnings. In much the same way that marking up every bit of a book with a highlighter obscures its key points, too many warnings are like no warnings at all.

In some respects, forging a color strategy is a bit like tidying and organizing. Taipei urgently needs its color scheme cleaned up to create a more comfortable and harmonious urban environment. Agua Chou and the City Yeast team are aiming to carry out just such a cleanup.

The Small Shop Signmaker program helps stores change their signage. A signboard incorporating a business’s “cultural DNA” can quietly express the shop’s essence while also fitting into its surroundings.

Agua’s color design

Since returning from studies in France, Agua Design founder Agua Chou has won several international awards for her outstanding work on a variety of commercial design projects. In spite of her accomplishments, she has been plagued by the idea that designers should serve people’s needs and take on society’s problems. She and her team hatched the City Yeast project to address those ends through an unusual concept: the idea of every city resident as a spore of yeast, capable of “fermenting” change. 

Throughout City Yeast’s brainstorming and discussion of ideas, they focused on “city colors” as a key issue. When City Yeast and Taipei City’s Urban Regeneration Office put together the Taipei City Color project in 2011 to look at data on the distribution of colors across the city, they invited interested citizens to walk Taipei’s streets with them and investigate the colors used in the Xinyi and Da’an Districts. During the process, they gathered 1,368 photos showing the city’s use of color, and published them in an ebook called Taipei Color Book.

City Yeast also helped resolve an ongoing issue for public bus riders: being unable to figure out which direction buses were headed in. City Yeast’s solution involved color coding. Eastbound buses were identified with green signs at bus stops to suggest the mountains that surround the city’s east side. Northbound buses got red signage to echo the north side’s mangrove swamps (literally “red forest” in Mandarin). Westbound stops got blue signage to denote the river, and southbound buses got brown for the south side’s Tucheng (literally, “earthen town”). By using colors based on geography and unique characteristics to associate colors with Taipei’s cardinal directions and then applying them at bus shelters, City Yeast extended the symbolic connotations of these four hues.

City Yeast used symbolic connotations of color—green for east, blue for west, brown for south, and red for north—to resolve the difficulty many people waiting for public transport were having in getting their bearings.

Aesthetic subtraction

In 2016, City Yeast earned an opportunity to put its color research into action. Taipei has more than 9,000 electrical transformer boxes, which have a real impact on the city’s streetscape. These boxes are currently a standardized green color, although some have landscapes or bird-and-flower paintings on them. While the latter are intended to make the boxes more visually appealing, they were introduced without any planning and just add to the city’s visual chaos.

In Agua’s view, “People ought to be a city’s protagonists.” She therefore felt that the key to the project was finding ways to integrate the transformer boxes into the cityscape so as to create a comfortable, harmonious environment.

City Yeast began setting up a project workshop in December 2015, and invited interested citizens to join excursions to the transformers’ locations and to participate in discussions about appropriate colors. In February 2016, they painted the transformer boxes they anticipated working on white, and proclaimed that changes were coming. They put transformer boxes painted in test colors on display at City Hall Plaza in March, then began rolling out the actual changes in April. Their design guidelines focused on using low-saturation colors that don’t show dirt, integrating the boxes with their surroundings and making them locally prominent.

For example, Songjiang Road is an important financial corridor, and City Yeast’s preliminary color observations revealed the widespread use of gray on the area’s buildings. They therefore chose to use a gray gradient on Songjiang Road’s transformer boxes. On the other hand, they chose coffee-brown, which exudes calm and stability but also inevitably feels “old,” for boxes in the more cultured atmosphere of Xinsheng South Road in the National Taiwan University area.

The designers used a variety of techniques to achieve their design objectives. In general, they went with darker colors because such shades can make objects appear smaller. When they found two boxes next to one another, they painted their facing sides complementary colors to create a kind of visual tangent and sense of gradation. They separated the information on the boxes into a pedestrian side and a street side to reduce the visual burden. They also treated the project as an exercise in color education, painting the base, pedestal, central mass, and warning text of each box in colors that passersby could easily recognize as having been matched, to make them more aware of the city’s hues. The result of all their work was that the streetside transformer boxes became both obviously designed, but very low-key. That is the magic of color.

“The hardest part of the transformer box project was its objective,” says Agua. “Our hope was that by ‘transforming’ the transformers, we could start a discussion about Taipei’s colors.”

Hsieh Pei-ni, commissioner of the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs, observes that Taipei is the freest city in Asia and has the highest level of freedom of speech in the Chinese-speaking world. She believes the city should promote participatory design to encourage everyone to express their views, because design, like culture, involves all of us. In essence, her view is that the cityscape belongs to us all, so we should save it ourselves.

The City Yeast project enables the general public to participate in discussions and decide for themselves what color their city should be through on-site observations and workshops.

One small step....

The redesign of the transformers might seem like nothing more than a small change on your street, and it is just one small idea from among the many that City Yeast has had. But implementing it represents a huge step forward in the process of reworking the colors of Taipei’s cityscape. Han Wu, CEO of World Design Capital Taipei 2016, says: “In the future, aspects of the cityscape such as street furniture and even business signage are all likely to be subject to color strategies that will change the way the city looks. The transformers are significant as the first step along this path.” Hsieh says that an even more positive aspect of the transformer project has been its attention to details such as color, shape, and materials, which she believes will now become a standard part of city design deliberations.

The year-long World Design Capital program is busily sowing seeds in every corner of the city. Agua’s original vision was for design to change existing circumstances and enable Taipei’s unique character to grow naturally and spontaneously. While the repainting of the transformer boxes may have been only one small step for City Yeast, it has been a giant leap for Taipei color.

The City Yeast project enables the general public to participate in discussions and decide for themselves what color their city should be through on-site observations and workshops.

Agua Chou leads the City Yeast project, which uses design to change existing circumstances so that Taipei’s unique character can shine through. She hopes to use the project to make Taipei still more beautiful. (photo by Chin Hung-hao)

City Yeast’s project to repaint electrical transformer boxes utilized an extended process that ultimately resulted in boxes that are low key, but also very obviously designed. (photo by Chin Hung-hao)

City Yeast’s project to repaint electrical transformer boxes utilized an extended process that ultimately resulted in boxes that are low key, but also very obviously designed. (photo by Chin Hung-hao)

Hsieh Pei-ni, commissioner of the Taipei City Department of Cultural Affairs, believes that as the freest city in Asia, Taipei should get behind participatory design. (photo by Chin Hung-hao)

A city’s protagonists ought to be the people who live in it, and they should be the ones to decide its color scheme. (photo by Chin Hung-hao)