Eve Ashcraft is a rare commodity in the design world, an expert on everything to do with color.

For 25 years, her firm, Eve Ashcraft Studio, has consulted with designers, architects, private clients, businesses and institutions on colors for everything from interiors, exteriors, and corporate branding to paint lines, wayfinding and exhibition design.

A painter by training with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, Ashcraft approaches color with an artist’s eye coupled with a keen sense of light and context. Her holistic approach consistently marries colors to spaces, forms, and materials as well as to her clients’ sensibilities. 

Earlier in her career she consulted with Richard Avedon on the typeface palettes for his book covers, and developed the colors for Martha Stewart Living’s inaugural paint lines, the Araucana Colors and Everyday Colors, which turned designer paint into a mass-market sensation. In 2011 Ashcraft released her book, THE RIGHT COLOR (Artisan Books). Both visual delight and smart primer, this definitive guide to color and paint distills two decades of experience into eye-opening and approachable lessons. Treating the reader as a private client, she offers step-by-step guidance in developing one’s personal palette and then applying it at home.

In addition to her practice Ashcraft spent five years teaching graduate level architecture students about color at Parsons The New School for Design. She has also given presentations and lectures for The Rhode Island School of Design, The New York Botanical Society, The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, The Institute for Classical Architecture and The Bard Graduate Center for Decorative Arts.

More recently Ashcraft worked with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill and other designers to develop the materials and signage colors for the new Moynihan Train Hall in New York City. This past year she created a proprietary color collection for bespoke lighting by The Urban Electric Co. Currently she is working with the exhibition design team and curators at the Art Institute of Chicago to implement a programmatic architectural color palette for use in the museum's permanent collection galleries. Additionally she has been tasked with developing a range of colors for the walls surrounding the museum's post-impressionist jewel in the crown, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat.