Economics thesis cover colour: yellow, green or burgundy

Yellow (evoking gold, wealth and the management of resources) is the traditional colour for Economics, but in recent years two other options have emerged alongside it: green (growth and prosperity) and midnight blue (institutional restraint, LUISS's choice).

For Economics the most common combinations are:

The decision depends on context. (1) University: at LUISS midnight blue is almost mandatory for institutional consistency. Sapienza, Tor Vergata and Roma Tre leave you free. (2) Angle of the thesis: traditional theses (microeconomics, classic macroeconomics) → yellow; sustainability/ESG/circular-economy theses → green; banking/finance/corporate theses → navy blue. (3) Professional profile: if you want the thesis cover to work as a business card for the corporate world, blue or green convey more professionalism than classic yellow. Yellow remains perfect for academic theses and pure economic research.

This is the practical reason many Economics graduates end up choosing green or blue, and it is worth knowing before you order.

Yellow is the only light cover colour among the traditional ones, and on a light background gold foil almost disappears: the two tones are too close and from half a metre the title does not stand out. It is the mistake we see most often in this faculty, and it only becomes obvious once the job is finished. The combinations that genuinely work on yellow are black foil, which gives maximum contrast, and bronze, which stays warm but stays readable.

Then there is the matter of marks: a light cover shows fingerprints far more than a dark one, and a thesis changes hands plenty of times between printing and discussion. If you are set on yellow but want peace of mind, leatherette cleans up better than cloth.

Dark green and midnight blue, both growing in this faculty especially for sustainability and finance theses, have neither problem: they carry gold and they do not mark.

Your programme's regulations almost certainly say nothing about colour. It is the question we get most often at the counter, and the answer surprises people: submission rules prescribe the binding type, the number of copies and the digital file format, and practically never the shade of the cover. Colour is tradition, not rule.

There are two practical exceptions. The first is your supervisor: if they have a preference it outweighs any tradition, and one email is all it takes to find out. The second is cohort submissions, where the registrar asks for uniform theses within the same session: more common in the science faculties.

So: no committee has ever rejected a thesis over the colour of its cover. What does get challenged is the wrong binding or a non-compliant PDF/A. If you have not done so yet, it is worth reading which binding you need and how to create a PDF/A.

Looking for another faculty? Ingegneria · Giurisprudenza · Medicina. The full map of the nine traditional colours is in the thesis colours by faculty guide; the colour of the laurel-wreath ribbon, which follows the same tradition, is in the graduation day guide.