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Classic Blue is Pantone's 2020 Color of The Year
There should be a book about why!
Posted on Dec 4th, 2019
TIME Magazine says Pantone's Color of the Year is a comforting start to 2020.
Reassuring, thought-provoking, dependable, anchoring, foundational, trusted, classic and confident—it’s not about doing it like you did in the past, but reinterpreting it.
#bluemind #liveblue
"Whether it’s logical or not, humans seem drawn to the color blue. It’s overwhelmingly chosen as their favorite color by people around the world, beating its closest competing color by a factor of three or four. Both women and men prefer blue to green, red, or purple. And blue is everywhere: while it’s the rarest color in nature (appearing only occasionally in plants or animals), on every sunny day we can look up and be dazzled by the incredible blue of the sky. Water, too, possesses a range of blue tones, mixed in with greens and browns and whites depending on depth and location.
When marketers and psychologists have asked people what qualities they associate to blue, they use words like “ credibility,” “calming,” “clean,” “focused,” “cleanliness,” “openness,” “depth,” and “wisdom.” Emotionally, blue is associated with trust, confidence, and dependable strength: is it any wonder that companies such as Facebook, AT&T, Lowe’s, American Express, HP, IBM, Walmart, Pfizer, and Vimeo use blue in their corporate logos? (Blue even predominates on the packaging of black- and- white Oreo cookies.) You can open almost any magazine and see several ads that use beautiful washes of blue to market everything from tropical or ski vacations to the latest offer from Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond. Even those who are well aware that the success of their products involves reducing a sense of calm and increasing a sense of urgency go blue; witness the logos of Facebook and Twitter.
Due to its specific wavelength, the color blue is known to exert a calming, relaxing, yet energizing effect and thus stimulate a positive emotional response. In fact, the arousal mechanism stimulated by blue’s wavelengths correlates to the release of neurotransmitters thought to be associated with feelings of euphoria, joy, reward, and wellness related to the effects of dopamine.
It’s far more fun to push past “blue is good” and ask — at the risk of offering up a just-so story — “why would we have evolved for it to be so?” From an evolutionary point of view we can imagine that auditory function being enhanced in response to the color blue could indicate proximity to open sky and water, implying a need to listen more carefully for distant sounds than when in a more closed or confined locale. Or, while we are conjecturing, couldn’t it have been because the “white noise” of waves and current made it harder to hear, versus the quieter savannah?"
"The color of young dreams is changing from green to blue.” — ERIC CHARLESWORTH
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