The Colour of The Year (Edited ver.)

[최윤희]

[culture]

The Colour of The Year

by Choi Yunhee, Culture reporter, sleepycat4.0@mju.ac.kr

    Colours effect us in many ways; from our emotions to our life as a consumer. Like fashion trends that change every year, there is a colour trend which also changes annually. The company Pantone has led this since year 2000 and announces the lists of next year’s and season’s colours every fall or December.

    For this year’s representative trend colour, coral, pink, lime green, earthy, and gold had been selected. Let’s take a brief look at the main characteristics of each colour in the list. 

    Living Coral is an inviting colour to the beauty and fragility of our marine life and oceans, coral radiates a freash and vibrant hue for a new kick. Pink is an attention holder as the proved versatile colour in the design world. Lime Grean associates with nature, confidence, and high energy. And also according to colour psychology experts, it is thought to promote feelings of liveliness, freshness, and creativity. Eathy tone could be seen as a bridge between nature and design. And last but not least, gold, a colour that exudes luxury, success, achievement, triumph, wealth, and sometimes, class. 

    But taking a closer look at one of the colours on the list, there’s more than just pretty designs and sales products. 

    Pantone’s art director, Huei Yin Wong, and copy writer, Jack Railton-Woodcock, said out loud that Pantone’s choices one the colours were “tone-deaf and irresponsible.” And added that a brand as influential as Pantone should (speak up/raise their voices) to the creators in every field concerning social issues and matters such as climate change.

    The two selected ‘Living Coral - Pantone 16-1546’, a mix of orange and pink which gives out a warm and calm feeling as this years colour. The reason behind this was to make known(?) of the situation where for the last three years, more than 45% of corals in the Great Barrier Reef has been wiped out due to climate change.

    Wong and Railton-Woodcock had also picked out and proposed a light blue ‘Pantone-115-1 U’ as to be one of the colours of 2020. They say the colour represents the fading color of a coral and actually named it ‘Bleached Coral’. They have with them the belief that Pantone actually has the power to encourage others to find a way to solve or acknowledge the environmental problems other than the corals in Great Barrier Reef, not only being a company that chose colour for show.

    With this idea at hand, there arose other proposals to the to-be trend colour of 2020. The neutral colour, Cassis, image colour that relates with the olympic, which would be held in Tokyo, and NASA’s investigation in Mars: Neo-mint is also on the list of the representative colours of 2020. 

    Aside from Pantone, a paint brand, Dulex, has chose a cool-tone shade of green as its Coulour of the Year of 2020, as an connecting link to an ‘increasingly disconnected’ modern society.  

    Dulux says that Tranquil Dawn "embodies the nation's mood on the approach of a new decade", and that "it reflects a growing desire to understand what it is to be human at a time when advances in technology are making us feel increasingly disconnected from each other."

    There are actual impact that colours make in dealing with social, cultural issues, not to mention their use in areas of fashion and design; either as a combination of colours or as an individual, representative colour. As an example, green makes us think of Greenpeace, red and blue of police, and the red and white as red cross. 

    Next time, when you see a specific colour that catches your eye, whether you’re in a cafe or a book store or at a wild party, think of what it corresponds with and try to think why those colours caught your eye.