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5 huge colour trends for 2021

By Tom May

We predict the colour palettes that will be big in the creative world over the next 12 months.

As creative people, we all like to think we don’t follow trends, but do our own unique and original thing. And that’s all to the good. But ultimately, we all swim together in the same cultural sea. And so while you don't want to slavishly copy the latest trends, it’s useful to at least know what they are.

In this article, we’ll look at some of the clearest colour trends to emerge in 2020, that we believe will only heighten over the year to come. We’ll offer examples of the trends in action, and explain why we believe they’re likely to influence creative work across the board, including illustration, graphic design, motion graphics and animation, over the next 12 months.

For advice on how to use these trends in your work, explore our colour theory article.

01. Muted colours and soft pastels

Branding featuring drawings of families

Visual identity for Mello by Studio Skulptur (Image credit: Mello)

We’ve seen a huge rise in use of muted colours and soft pastels in 2020, and that’s not really surprising. The global pandemic and resulting lockdowns have thrown everyday life into chaos and confusion across the world. It’s the biggest thing to ever happen in most people’s lives, and for many, it’s the scariest. So it makes perfect sense that the design world would respond with calmer colour palettes that provide a feeling of safety and reassurance.

A great example is the visual identity for Mello (opens in new tab), an app designed to help parents connect and build support networks during the pandemic. Designed by Studio Skulptur, its colour palette is suitably mellow, clearly conveying the message that everything’s going to be okay, honestly.

When the UK’s first lockdown ended, Camden Town Brewery took a similar approach with its designs for a limited edition beer (opens in new tab) to celebrate the return to the pub. Based on illustrations by Gaurab Thakali, the palette hit the sweet spot between both warm and inviting, and calm and soothing. And with businesses everywhere struggling to tempt people out of their houses and spending money again, this approach to colour was repeated across the board.

Posters featuring gadgets against background of pastel colours

Branding for Curry’s PC World by Futurebrand (Image credit: Curry's PC World)

Take the new branding for Curry’s PC World (opens in new tab), crafted by Futurebrand (shown above). In a sector that was once dominated by shouty slogans and gaudy, in-your-face colour schemes, it’s striking to see the kind of colour palette you might once have associated with a children’s nursery employed as standard. A similar approach can be seen in Locomotive’s designs for technology company ITI.

02. Nostalgic faded colour

Posters for Conviction Records

Posters for Conviction Records by Everything Will Be Fine (Image credit: Conviction Records)

It’s not just muted colours that have been used to evoke calm this year. The faded colours of nostalgia-fuelled designs, harking back to the heyday of print and low-fi production methods, have also been big throughout 2020. 

This style has been central to many Covid-centric projects, such as Annie Atkins’ brilliant wartime-parody posters, Virus Slogans (opens in new tab), which are now available as postcards. Faded, nostalgia-tinged colours could also be seen in Everything Will Be Fine’s branding for Conviction Records (opens in new tab), a social enterprise aimed at crime prevention and rehabilitation (shown above).

Poster for Spotify playlist

(Image credit: Spotify)

Stink Studios, meanwhile, used a similar approach in their branding for Spotify’s virtual alternative to this year’s cancelled Notting Hill Carnival (opens in new tab) (shown above). And it can also be seen, too, in Koto’s visual identity for Meatable (opens in new tab), a meat company aiming to give its animals a better life. 

And the next 12 months? Let's face it, the pandemic's not going away any time soon. And so with more and more of us looking back longingly at the past – a time when we could mingle and hug each other with impunity – we fully expect this colour trend to heighten in 2021. 

03. Purposely limited palettes

Black and yellow branding for beer

40ft Brewery IPA by NorthSouth (Image credit: 40ft Brewery)

Life in 2020 has been nothing if not limited, with our daily activities stripped-back to the bare essentials. So it makes sense that we’ve seen lots of limited colour palettes across the design world, too. 

NorthSouth, for example, took inspiration from the black and yellow tape that’s been spreading across our cities and public spaces when branding 40ft Brewery’s post-lockdown IPA (opens in new tab) (above). Meanwhile Mouthwash Studio’s visual identities for both fashion label The Museum of Peace & Quiet (opens in new tab) and furniture retailer Waka Waka (opens in new tab) kept colour variation to a similarly muted minimum.

Two mobile phone screenshots featuring Afterparty Bondi Mint

Afterpay branding by Yummy Colours (Image credit: Afterpay)

Elsewhere, Yummy Colours took the mint-green trend and ran with it for fintech brand Afterpay (opens in new tab), teaming up with Pantone to create a custom colour called Afterparty Bondi Mint, and drenching their new visual identity in the hue (above). This approach was echoed, in other shades of green, by Gretel's celebrated rebrand of NI Instruments (opens in new tab).

04. Radical monochrome

Abstract design featuring blurry photo of person

Futurimpose's new website, designed in-house (Image credit: Futurimpose)

When it comes to a nostalgic take on colour, you can’t get much more old-school than black and white. But counterintuitively, we've seen a lot of this colour scheme being used in 2020, not to evoke the past, but herald a radical future. It seems that after the dominance of bright bold neons in the 2010s, monochrome is now the best way to be edgy and disruptive.

Check out, for instance, the visuals on the website for Futurimpose (opens in new tab), the rebrand of the design studio previously known as Superimpose (shown above). Monochrome is also used to great effect within the sterotype-busting identity for vegan chocolate Love Raw (opens in new tab) by Daughter Studio, and the boundary-pushing site for user experience agency Vide Infra (opens in new tab).

Black whisky bottle

Packaging for Johnnie Walker whisky by Diageo (Image credit: Diageo)

There are signs, too, that this approach to colour is moving from edge cases into the mainstream. Witness the bold and inventive new packaging for Johnnie Walker whisky's new plastic-free bottle (opens in new tab) by Diageo, for example (shown above). 

Also note that monochrome needn't just mean black and white. Beans marketing agency, for one, pulls off the same trick in yellow with its recently redesigned website (opens in new tab), crafted by DOPS Digital.

05. Colour as a political statement

Three black squares under Instagram hashtag #blacklivesmatter

Colour became political this year (Image credit: Instagram)

Can you make a political statement with colour alone? That question was swiftly answered following the death of George Floyd this May, when millions around the world posted black squares on their social media feeds in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement (shown above). 

Another example of the trend was the use of pink by celebrities in the runup to the American elections to show their support for the Democrats, a visual nod to the women’s march of January 2017. Or how in Hong Kong, shops and businesses have signified their opposition or support for the democracy movement, by coding themselves respectively blue or yellow; a reference to the umbrellas used to defend protestors against pepper spray from police.

Logo for the Pantone colour, Period

Pantone wanted to start a conversation around periods (Image credit: Pantone/Intimina)

On a different note, Pantone raised eyebrows in October by creating a new colour (opens in new tab) in collaboration with health brand Intimina called Period (above). An original shade of red that is said to represent a steady flow during menstruation, the release was aimed at creating a conversation around periods and to empower everyone in society, regardless of gender, to talk freely about the subject.

With politics becoming ever more fractured and unstable across the world, and the inevitable economic downturn unlikely to help matters, expect more of this in 2021. And designers would do well to keep on top of the changing political significance of colours, lest they send unintentional signals with their work.

Read more:

  • Has this year's icon design trend gone too far?
  • 11 surprising graphic design trends for 2021
  • 21 outstanding uses of colour in branding

Creative Bloq created this content as part of a paid partnership with Adobe Stock. The contents of this article are entirely independent and solely reflect the editorial opinion of Creative Bloq.

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Tom May
Tom May

Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity (opens in new tab), published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects. 

Topics
Colour
design trends
Design
Art
Graphic design

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