In addition to the visual style of their speaking voices, Mazzucchelli assigns meaning to the colors he uses throughout the novel. In general, flashbacks are told in variations of cyan, magenta, and purple, while the present timeline and dream sequences are told in purple and yellow. Outside of the normal coloring schema, Asterios and Hana are also given specific styles that represent their core identities. Asterios, as the arrogant and allegedly rational architectural professor, is sometimes drawn using a combination of geometric shapes, cool blue cyan, and an no shading to emphasize his lack of subtlety. Hana, a shy but brilliant sculptor who makes her work out of found objects, is drawn in a warm magenta with delicate crosshatch shading to emphasize her organic form. Hana’s and Asterios’s individual artistic styles are opposite in almost every way, an indication of their opposing perspectives of the world.

The degree to which these two designs blend signifies the status of Asterios and Hana’s relationship. When the two first interact at a faculty meeting, Mazzucchelli shows their budding attraction by utilizing a subtle combination of both Hana’s pink crosshatching and Asterios’s cyan geometry. As they continue to grow in their relationship, their forms become more fully fleshed out and they begin to wear each other’s colors more often, even when they still drawn in the novel’s default style. The fact that they are drawn using the other’s symbolism indicates that they are beginning to enter into one another’s world.

The presence of these core identities is not always a good sign, however. During the two major fights between the couple—the former of which is rectified fairly quickly, whereas the latter is the harbinger of their impending divorce—this way of sketching the characters appears in order to show a fracturing, rather than a melding, of their perspectives. To focus on the latter situation, the argument begins with a circular panel of Hana bordered by a thick, magenta band, indicating that she has begun to separate herself by retreating into her natural mode of viewing the world. As the fight progresses, the two characters become more and more stylized. Instead of overlapping as before, the colors are strictly divided; the side of the room that Hana is standing in is shaded in magenta, and Asterios’s (ever-shrinking) side is lined in cyan.  

The primary reason for this rift between the two characters lies in the divisive way that Asterios has chosen to view the world. This desire for duality manifests itself in his architectural designs, which are all designed to have perfect symmetry in the form of two equal and opposite parts. For example, his works “The Akimbo Arms” and “Parallel Park”. Asterios, however, is a paper architect—meaning that despite his various awards and commendations for his designs, none of them have ever actually been built. Perhaps Mazzucchelli is trying to suggest that while duality may work as a theory, it cannot work in the real world.  

Asterios claims that his desire to split everything into “this” vs. “that” simply makes it easier to compare and therefore understand a subject, but Mazzucchelli makes it clear that while Asterios may present both options, he often has a strong predilection for one over the other.  When Asterios sees Hana’s artwork for the first time, at first Hana feels complimented and heard, as demonstrated by the fact that Mazzucchelli draws a spotlight around her. However, because the panel is bathed in cyan, rather than magenta, the observant reader immediately realizes that the color choice indicates that something is about to go wrong.  
