In the movie The Devil Wears Prada, there’s a scene where Anne Hathaway’s character Andrea Sachs, the frumpy assistant to Runway fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly, scoffs at the fashion team when they struggle to choose between two seemingly identical blue belts for the magazine’s cover shoot. An irritated Priestly schools Sachs with a lecture about the fashion industry’s influence on seasonal color trends. Priestly explains how the shades used by top clothing designers trickle down through the rest of the industry and quickly infiltrate home design and retail stores.
But that’s just a scene from a chick flick. That’s not how color trends really begin, right? Wrong.
Each spring and fall, Pantone®, the company that sets the design industry’s professional color standards, releases a report identifying the 10 most influential colors of the season. The hot new color trends are based on the results of a survey completed by fashion designers during New York Fashion Week.
Color trends typically reflect environmental and economical influences and evolve from year to year. The 2010 “color of the year” is Pantone 15-5519 which, roughly translated, is turquoise. This season’s color trends are brighter than in previous years to reflect people’s excitement about technology, less fear and nesting as memories of 9/11 begin to fade, optimism about an improving economy, embracing our multi-cultural society and eyes that are trained to look at bright colors on a computer screen.
The next time you ask your creative team to come up with a new design concept for your marketing collateral or new product launch, rest assured that their color choices are not taken lightly. Designers take psychological influences, competitors’ brand strategies, size and strength of the market, usage adoption rate, product name, demographics of the target audience and other brand elements into consideration when they create a new look for your product. Balancing these factors helps ensure that your brand evokes the right emotional response and complements the hottest color trends on the market.
