While companies like Crayola constantly search for even more imaginative and creative and sometimes strange names for their colors, a young designer duo from Japan created a completely different way of understanding color, by doing away with names completely. Names can be restrictive sometimes, water and sky aren’t just ”blue” and leaves can be more than ”green”, that’s why Yusuke Imai and Ayami Moteki designed ‘The Nameless Paints’, whose colors are identified, not by names, but by just their color.  “By not assigning names to the colors we want to expand the definition of what a color can be, and the various shades they can create by mixing them,”explains Imai. In fact names are not important at all as each of the 10 tubes included in the set, is marked by one or more circles of color and the size of the circle indicates the proportion of paint that were mixed to create the resulting color.

The set was originally part of the 2012 Kokuyo Design Awards, one of the most interesting design awards in Japan. The designer duo collaborated for 3 years with Kokuyo’s stationary brand Campus to refine their concept and eventually bring it to market. The set of “Nameless Paints” will go on sale in Japan this month.