Good colour design is nuanced. And so is good writing

A fresh perspective to easily improve your writing.

Good colour design is nuanced! Have you ever thought twice about sweeping statements like “green represents hope” or “red is a warm colour”? Sadly, many designers and architects haven’t, because their colour education never went beyond the trivial. But how we combine colours and the scale at which we use them does matter.—ALINA SCHARTNER, COLOUR EXPERT AND FORECASTER

I love this quote. Because yes, good colour design is nuanced.

And so is good writing.

Have you ever thought about it?

As in the case of these good ol’ stereotypes about colours (red is warm, green is for hope), we should all stop and think twice when we’re tempted to write that something is “interesting” or “great”, or even “the best” or “innovative”. Or to jot down one or two evergreen terms such as “able to”, “passion”, “unique”, or “strengths”.

All these dull, abstract, and empty words are so overused that they almost lose meaning. That your brain skips them when it sees them.

Enter: nuances. Possibly one of the best and easiest ways to instantly improve one’s writing.

How it looks like in practice

While writing, you should strive to constantly introduce different gradients, from light and soft to hard and loud, and layers.

🌈 You can nuance your text by swinging from “bewitching opportunities” to “knockout features”.

🌈 You can trash grey, useless terms such as “basically” or “totally”, which add no value or hue to the text.

🌈 You can drop here and there a few ultra-specific, delightful details that add texture, as well as make your message unique and laser-focused on the peculiar characteristics of your writing’s subject.

That’s what amazing writer Ash Ambirge calls the chicken-in-a-pot technique:

Ditching the abstract, and getting down and dirty with hyper-particular specifics. […] The sentence’s job is to force the brain to experience the paragraph instead of skipping over it when you say some broad category word.

And that’s another interesting phenomenon that occurs when you nuance and layer up your writing: it becomes more engaging. More interesting to read. More brimming with powerful meanings — on and under the surface. More difficult to ignore like the sports newspaper from last Thursday.

Takeaway

Of course, this technique can be used to varying degrees depending on what you’re writing for whom. However, it can always come to the rescue. Please allow me to squeeze in another quote from one of my writing heroes, Ash Ambirge: she takes this impersonal professional bio…

I served as Director of Marketing for eight years, where I was responsible for developing promotional campaigns, managing the company website, and producing content that aligned with company objectives.

…and transforms into a creative sentence that, like it or not, is simply impossible to ignore:

I served as Director of Marketing for eight years, where I was responsible for running video ads to the beat of Kanye, making sure our website wasn’t still advertising a promo from 2012, and writing the world’s most exciting articles on all the things you never knew you could do with kitty litter. (No, really, do you know what you can do with that stuff?)

In conclusion? We should never be afraid to twist our texts, swap our words, and sculpt our sentences a bit—in short, play with nuances and layers.

Chiara Foppa Pedretti © 2025