Color your own alphabet, even if you don’t have Synesthesia

Because your letter B is not the same color as mine.

If you also “see” letters or numbers as colors, then you have what’s called grapheme-color synesthesia.

I recently launched a project called “What Color is Your Name?” at Synesthesia.me. It features an interactive tool that shows how your name looks to me, someone with a particular kind of Synesthesia, and I wrote about it in this Medium post.

My synesthesia alphabet is unique to me.

I wanted a way to show people how I experience seeing letters as colors. The response was phenomenal, with nearly 2 million unique visitors from around the world trying it out. And while this was great for the 96% of people who do not have synesthesia, it was disconcerting to the small percentage of people with the same kind of Synesthesia. To them, my colors were just all wrong:

On Twitter and Instagram, I felt badly for those who saw their name in the “wrong” colors.

When you know your colors, you know your colors