Can you tell a pokémon's type by its colour? Colour and body shape in the design of 1,025 characters

Abstract

Character designers want players to understand a character at a glance, and colour is one of their main tools. This study uses the colour, type and body shape recorded for all 1,025 Pokémon species to ask how well colour shows a character's type. For the elemental types it works well: 61% of Grass Pokémon are green, 59% of Fire Pokémon red and 54% of Water Pokémon blue. Ghost Pokémon are split between two dark colours (black and purple together, 54%), while Psychic Pokémon (17% in their most common colour) and Bug Pokémon (23%) are weakly tied to any colour. Guessing a species' type from the types of species in other evolution families is right for 30% of species when based on colour, 22% when based on body shape and 32% with both, against 13% by always guessing the most common type. Colour is therefore the stronger signal, and shape adds little to it overall, although some types, such as Bug and Fighting, are concentrated in particular shapes.

Keywords: character design, colour, silhouette, game art, Pokémon, visual communication

References

1. Elliot A.J., Maier M.A. Color psychology: effects of perceiving color on psychological functioning in humans // Annual Review of Psychology. 2014. Vol. 65. P. 95-120. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115035
2. PokeAPI: the RESTful Pokémon API (species, colour, type, shape and evolution chain endpoints). https://pokeapi.co (accessed 16.10.2026 and 30.10.2026).

How to cite

Pifagor High School, Almaty, Kazakhstan Can you tell a pokémon's type by its colour? Colour and body shape in the design of 1,025 characters // Central Asian Scientific Journal. – 2026. – No. 4(32), Vol. 2. – Pp. 286–289.