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.
Dive into the report below to find out our picks from the Studio!
Insight
