Pantone Colour of the Year 2022 is a brand new colour, to reflect our “transformative times”

It’s the most colourful time of the year for Pantone, as the company makes inevitable global headlines announcing its Colour of the Year: a tone it believes will define the following year’s visual landscape. For 2022 it’s Very Peri – no, not a saucy orange, all you cheeky Nando’s lovers out there – but a periwinkle blue with violet-red undertones which apparently holds “courageous presence” that “encourages personal inventiveness and creativity,” Pantone says. Not content with any of its thousands of existing hues, Pantone has created this new colour specially for the occasion, symbolic of the societal “transition we are going through”.

Very Peri (Pantone 17-3938) represents “the global zeitgeist,” a release from Pantone proclaims. “As we emerge from an intense period of isolation, our notions and standards are changing, and our physical and digital lives have merged in new ways. Digital design helps us to stretch the limits of reality, opening the door to a dynamic virtual world where we can explore and create new colour possibilities. With trends in gaming – the expanding popularity of the metaverse and rising artistic community in the digital space – Very Peri illustrates the fusion of modern life and how colour trends in the digital world are being manifested in the physical world and vice versa.”

“As we move into a world of unprecedented change, the selection of Very Peri brings a novel perspective and vision of the trusted and beloved blue colour family,” adds Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of Pantone Color Institute. “Encompassing the qualities of the blues, yet at the same time possessing a violet-red undertone, Very Peri displays a spritely, joyous attitude and dynamic presence that encourages courageous creativity and imaginative expression.”

2021’s colour of the year rather aptly was Ultimate Gray, alongside Illuminating, a sunny yellow, which aimed to bring some hope to the bleak events.