Pantone chooses two colours of the year to bring in 2021

There is general agreement on very little in this world, save perhaps for one thing: This year has been a mess and the next one cannot come fast enough.

So it should be a surprise to no one that the prognosticators at Pantone — those trend forecasters who scour the globe for months noting developments in clothing, cars, kitchens, coffee (the stuff that surrounds us) and translate it into a colour they claim will be the dominant shade of the coming year — have chosen, as the colour of the year for 2021 … two colours!

Get ready for Ultimate Grey and Illuminating. Or, in normal-speak: the light at the end of the tunnel. After Living Coral in 2019 and Classic Blue in 2020, this may not be what anyone expected (that might have been “grim black”), but it might be what everyone needs.

“No one colour could get across the meaning of the moment,” Laurie Pressman, the vice-president of the Pantone

Color Institute, said on a call. “We all realized we cannot do this alone. We all have a deeper understanding of how we need each other and emotional support and hope.”

Hence, said Leatrice Eiseman, the executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, the decision to select “two independent colours really coming together.”

The prognosticators began by acknowledging the shades of grey in which we have all been immersed. Indeed, of all the greys in the palette, Ultimate Grey is a determinedly neutral kind of grey. “It’s a dependable grey,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the institute.

One person’s dependable is another person’s depressing, however, which is where Illuminating comes in. It’s not the egg yolk-like yellow of Mimosa, the colour of the year of 2009, more of a sunshine, or smiley face, yellow.

Together, Eiseman said, “the colour combination presses us forward.”