D4R’s Colour of the Year
With Pantone’s choice regarded as a swing and a miss, we asked our team for their predictions on what’s going to be hot next year.
A VIEW FROM THE STUDIO
With Pantone’s choice regarded as a swing and a miss, we asked our team for their predictions on what’s going to be hot next year.
Like many other artists and designers we’re disappointed with Pantone’s colour of the year choice. It’s a nice neutral accent (just ‘nice’ is a term we hate) and fine as an accent or background. But choosing such a muted shade when so many vivid, inspiring colours exist feels disappointingly safe. Pantone have presented Cloud Dancer as signifier of a great cultural reboot. A calm, liminal space in an era of AI-driven acceleration and digital overstimulation.
The soft white is described with poetic optimism- fresh starts, a new page, rebooted simplicity. It’s marketed as a signal of calm, clarity, and a collective desire for a fresh start. But calling white “the colour of the year” in 2026 isn’t defining a new era. It’s just… white. And the distance between Pantone’s prediction and what people actually want has never been more obvious.
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