What inspired a deep dive into colour trends

Have you ever been excited to hear the latest Colour of the Year or the newest seasonal colour trend, yet once they are announced you find yourself asking the question: “What am I supposed to do with that?”

If you’ve said that you’re not alone - I hear this from designers every time a new colour trend is announced and the other common questions I hear are “How do we know if that’s for our industry?” or “What do I do when my client is fixated on using the latest trend colour, but I know it doesn’t work in their scheme?”

A couple of years ago I really started paying attention to these questions and I dug a little deeper and asked designers what other questions they had about colour trends - and they just started spilling out.

And I realised that for a lot of designers colour trends seem to be a bit of the dark arts.

So that got me curious.

Professionally, I’ve always thought that when every major forecaster comes out with a different colour it makes it even harder to know which one to go with. It’s almost like every colour ends up being ‘on trend’!

And the other thing that really fascinated me was why we would go with a colour that a company has picked for us? That’s the opposite of what you do from a colour psychology perspective, which is choose your colours by going within and how you want them to make you think, feel and behave.

So between my own curiosity and the continual questions I was hearing from designers about how to use trends, I knew this was something I had to explore further. So I did. And that’s how the idea for my upcoming course Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know about Colour Trends came about.

It’s been a mammoth creation. It’s been 2.5 years in the making as I kept finding myself diving deep down rabbit holes and the more I uncovered, the more I uncovered!

And because there are so many parts to the colour trends jigsaw, each time I thought I was nearly done there was something else I uncovered which I had to add in to make sure I’d answered all the questions designers wanted to know. Which it now does, and I can honestly say there is nothing else like this on the market.

Answering your questions such as…

• What’s the purpose of colour trends? Isn’t it just marketing?
• How do we use them? And why the companies don’t tell us.?
• How do we know which trend colours are right for our client or project?
• What do we do if the colour trends doesn’t fit our own design aesthetic?
• How do we achieve timeless designs working with trends?
• What is the environmental impact of colour trends? Surely this isn’t sustainable?
• How to engage a colour trend forecaster and the questions to ask them?
• What do we do if our client doesn’t like or won't to use the current trend colours even if we think they are right for them?
• And much more…

I’ve brought it all together in the Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Colour Trends course so that it can stop feeling like the dark arts, and start to be something you utilise consciously in your design work.

Colourfully yours,
Karen