Pantone Announces 2018 Color of the Year: Living Coral

Carlstadt, New Jersey-based Pantone, a provider of professional color standards for designers, announces its 2018 Color of the Year: Living Coral 16-1546.

“Color is an equalizing lens through which we experience our natural and digital realities and this is particularly true for Living Coral,” says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute. “With consumers craving human interaction and social connection, the humanizing and heartening qualities displayed by the convivial Pantone Living Coral hit a responsive chord.”

This is the 20th year that Pantone has announced a color of the year. According to the organization, it has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in multiple industries, including fashion, home furnishings, and industrial design, as well as product, packaging, and graphic design. As it notes in its announcement, the process of choosing a color is quite involved and encompasses a worldwide search of various potential sources for ideas and inspiration, including motion pictures in production, traveling art collections and new artists, all types of fashion, and even lifestyles and socio-economic conditions.

“Pantone 16-1546 Living Coral emits the desired, familiar, and energizing aspects of color found in nature,” the company says in its announcement. “In its glorious, yet unfortunately more elusive, display beneath the sea, this vivifying and effervescent color mesmerizes the eye and mind. Lying at the center of our naturally vivid and chromatic ecosystem, Pantone Living Coral is evocative of how coral reefs provide shelter to a diverse kaleidoscope of color.”

In case you don’t recall, Ultra Violet was 2017’s Pantone Color of the Year.