Pantone Announces Ultimate Gray and Illuminating, as their Color of the Year selection for 2021
Pantone just announced its Pantone Color of the Year 2021 and it’s a selection of 2 colours: PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Grey and PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating. 🌝📐You can read their press release here or watch their introduction video below.
If you are unfamiliar with Pantone, just know they are a global colour authority and provider of professional colour language standards and digital solutions for a community of more than 10 million designers and producers. That means Pantone provides products and services that really influence design decisions in a wide range of categories including fashion, home furnishings, and industrial design, as well as product packaging and graphic design.
Each year, Pantone puts a lot of work to select their colours. It involves research into colour influencers in categories such as entertainment and film, travel, art, design & fashion. They also consider lifestyle, play-style, and socio-economic conditions.
PANTONE 13-0647 Illuminating
is a bright and cheerful yellow sparkling with vivacity, a warming yellow shade imbued with solar power.
PANTONE 17-5104 Ultimate Gray
Ultimate Grey is emblematic of solid and dependable elements which are everlasting and provide a firm foundation.
Pantone has selected these two colours together to create an aspirational pairing. They describe conjoining these colours as bringing forth deeper feelings of thoughtfulness with the optimistic promise of a sunshine filled day.
“A marriage of color conveying a message of strength and hopefulness that is both enduring and uplifting.”
After the turmoil of 2020, it makes perfect sense for Pantone to select two contrasting colours that support and complement each other. They hope that the colour pairing offers hope and stability….
Thinking of our favourite examples of using yellow-grey colour combinations in media, we can’t help but think of the music video for "Hold Up," a song recorded by Beyonce for Lemonade (2016).
The imagery and subject matter of this music video may be the antithesis of evoking feelings of a solid or firm foundation, but the effect of this yellow-grey combination certainly implies that director wanted to evoke feelings of joy and optimism despite turmoil…. and isn’t that what the colour selection this year is all about?
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