Welcome

AkzoNobel is the world's largest global paints and coatings company and as such, colour is extremely important to us. Our purpose is to 'Add Colour to People's Lives' by inspiring and enabling people around the world to decorate more easily and more often. We pride ourselves on our knowledge of colour and design and want to help our customers, consumers and the communities in which we work realize the uplifting effect that colour can have on their spirits.

Colour Futures is the result of ongoing international colour trend research, developed by AkzoNobel's Aesthetic Center. It provides the reader with global style and design trends and influences which are subsequently translated into colour palettes for use around the world.

Colour trends

Colour trends can emerge from all corners of society - some appear rapidly, others develop over several years. Frequently major trends last for an enduring period of time, even decades, but manifest themselves each year in a slightly different way.

A fashion, by contrast, is more immediate and is usually consciously followed - through clothes, food, interior products and certain aspects of lifestyle, whereas a trend is an underlying influence, inspiration, movement or prevailing direction. Trends are the reasons for fashion to exist and as such are deeper and more meaningful.

Trends team

Once a year the Aesthetic Center of AkzoNobel meets with an international group of creative experts from the fields of colour, design, architecture, and fashion, all with their fingers on the pulse of what is happening in trends and colour, to discuss and decide which ideas and colours we think will be key for the following year.

Our experts represent different parts of the world - SE Asia, India, USA/ Canada, South America, South Africa and all regions of Europe. They draw on a variety of national and international sources from fine art to technology, design to nature, architecture to fashion and music to popular culture.

Their views and insights about how trends and colour palettes will develop and evolve, what the most important influences are and how we will be living, are captured within Colour Futures a year in advance in order to give you the information you need to know to keep up to date with all trend developments.