“Spring” is a short animated film from the Blender Animation Studio, released in 2019 and shared under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. It follows a shepherd girl and her dog through a mountain landscape at the turn of the seasons.

Watch it with the sound off and you can follow the story through colour alone. The opening is cold and muted, all grey-blue snow and shadow. As the story turns, warmth creeps in at the edges of the frame: a patch of light, a flower, the gold of a sunrise.

That is a lesson for any designer. Colour is not decoration added at the end; it carries meaning and mood, and it can guide the eye before a single word is read. Restraint makes it stronger, too. Because “Spring” holds back its warm colours for so long, their arrival lands with real force.