Pantone’s Color Insider Gets to the Root of Trends

With the rapid pace of trend cycles and the rise of microtrends and subcultures , the creative community faces more pressure to stay ahead of trends and seize the zeitgeist while producing innovative designs and ideas more accurately than ever. Color trends play a crucial role in this, as color boosts brand recognition by 87 percent and affects up to 85 percent of purchasing decisions. This makes color—and understanding it—essential.

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To help with this, Pantone unveiled a new color intelligence service.

The global color authority has launched Pantone Color Insider: an “aesthetically provocative” and “culturally relevant” color-centric trend service uniting all areas of design through the shared language of color.

Balancing the “informative and insightful” with the “inspirational and innovative,” Pantone said, the color intelligence service features color trend forecasts and data to give users insight regarding what’s trending—short-term, long-term, macro and local—on key color stories.

“For over 25 years, the Pantone Color Institute has been a go-to destination from brands and designers around the world looking to understand the future of color trends and how to inform their own brand and product color choices. Pantone Color Insider gives us the opportunity to take a lot of this information and knowledge and make it accessible to our larger creative community,” said Laurie Pressman , vice president of Pantone Color Institute . “We believe this content can be an added support for designers to understand the relationship of color to global macro trends and what consumers are looking for to help inspire their design decisions. Never has this been so important, when design is being increasingly led by color and material and less by shape and form.”

Pantone Color Insider is available as an added feature within Pantone Connect, allowing current users to incorporate trending color data and insights into their current workflow within the digital platform. Pantone Color Insider adds “another layer of actionable expertise” to the platform, which contains color IP that helps designers execute color in print and manufacturing to create products, packaging and physical media. The design tool can also be integrated into core design programs and workflows, the company said, including being able to be used collaboratively in teams.

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“The Pantone Connect platform, since its inception , has been a collaborative project with our creative community, ensuring that we are listening to their needs and tailoring the product to help with their overall design workflow,” said Jung Sin , global senior director, digital product management at Pantone. “Through these discussions, we saw the need to also further support the research and inspiration stage of the design process. Pantone Color Insider will help designers and the larger creative community have context on what is happening in the world of color and actionable data to help with their color decision-making from the start of a project to ensuring color consistency and excellence at the end.”

The provider of professional color tools for designers is “collating” the experience from the team at the Pantone Color Institute into a digital experience. Pantone Color Insider will have a dedicated editorial team to collect, curate, and compose (up-to-the-minute) color stories that impact and influence design. The service will also feature content and data useful for creative inspiration, education and decision-making every week, including expert trend insights and color education. The global color data tool provides a quantitative look and “pulse check” on what’s happening in color worldwide, covering topline data highlighting color use across industries and cities to help inform designers about color usage of their peers across design.

“So many people come to us and expect to get this information from us, and we did not have information like this readily available [before],” Pressman said. “We are a unique destination where color comes first. We’re in the business of color; how could we not be a resource for color trends ? People depend on us to be that resource for all things color.”

Users can have “ freemium ” access to Pantone Color Insider’s limited content and basic palette-building or can sign up for one of two user options. The first is a premium subscription to Pantone Color Insider that contains the full site of trending articles and information, while the second is a bundle of Pantone Color Insider and Pantone Connect, containing the full suite of trend and data features as well as workflow and collaboration tools. Notably, Pantone Color Insider is mobile-friendly.

“[Pantone Color Insider]’s immediacy and saliency—it’s the color information , bu t it’s also the why—provides the confidence to make those color decisions,” Pressman said. This is what you need to know, and this is why we see it happening. The clarity and conciseness of what we can provide is really what people are looking for.”

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