Color of the year as predicted by Pantone – Honeysuckle

I’ll admit to have lived without knowing for the last ten years, but it appears that well-known color-company, Pantone, each year selects one color to be ‘Color of the Year’. The reason is probably to get some publicity and the opportunity to tell the world, that Pantone just happens to sell eco-paint with 3000 colors to choose from.

The commercial reasons aside, the colors chosen is great fun to look at – and perhaps get some learnings from.

At first I thought that no infographic artis working with news would use colours like that (except for the 2002 – True Red). Is that why infographics are becoming out of fashion in the newsindustry ever since 2002?

Next – as I lined up the colors in the graphic – I could suddenly see the supplement-heads of a modern newspaper (The Guardian comes to mind) based on these color-predictions. The only downside to create a colorscheme out of this list will obviously be that some of the content will feel instantly dated to the color-savvy.

( The Guardian knows this color-of-the-year thing – I just saw a story about Honeysuckle in todays paper). And their education-supplement is close to honeysuckle, so expect that section to gain importance in 2011.

And now that you know about it too, you should really promise yourself to experiment and use Honeysuckle as the dominant color in at least one infographic in the year to come. Only problem for print-artists might be that such a dark pinky tone isn’t the easiest for newspaperprinters to reproduce faithfully. If you’re going for online-graphics, then I have translated the fluffy color-names into web-colors for you – the ones starting with #.

But why stop with colors? We should definitely have letters of the year. Perhaps the W should be the one for 2010 – but what about 2011?

And we should get a shape of the year too. Like in 2011 we’ll all use the triangle more. I think the circle has been selected ‘Shape of the Year’ for the last three years anyway after replacing the rectangle of earlier times.