Color of the Year 2010: By The People [infographic]

Experts have long been trying to predict what color will be en vogue in the years to come. For big businesses, by knowing what colors the consumer will want they can create their products to match the hot new styles of tomorrow. With this line of thinking... Making thousands of purple shirts when green is the hot new style will leave the fashion retailer with lots of purple shirts sitting on the shelves.

While I agree with the idea of trying to create your products to match the desires of your consumers, in a world where on-demand, indie produced and mass customization is the biggest trend... Predicting large trends like color years in advance becomes a much more... creative exercise.

We wanted to look at what the people really felt like was their color for 2010. So we created a simple app that let them do this by stepping through a quick process to describe their color by keyword and then filter down to find an exact shade that embodies 2010 to them. (You can name your own color of 2010 at www.ColorOfTheYear.com)

More than 1,000 people from around the world told us their colors of the year for 2010... Here are the people's colors of the year:

(Click for Full Screen View)

BONUS Color Thought:

For some people with Synesthesia they don't just have a preference for what they want the color of the year to be... They literally experience words, numbers, days and months as distinct colors.

this is a top-down view of how i see the months of the year via my spatial-sequence syensthesia. the colored areas are the colors i hold for each month (which doesn't necessarily correspond to the color of the actual WORD for that month). [By Kelley
aka twitchcraft]

Sharing the Love With Our COTY Participants

As we were approaching the 1,000 named colors of the year, we thought it would be fun to create a drawing for those who shared their color of 2010 with us to win an awesome goodie box... We chose 5 random participants and they are: sero*, aynabcn, praxicalidocious, donnastitches & asheisarockstar

They'll get an awesome creative goodie box worth $200+...
ColorSchemer Software, COLOURlovers Sponsorship (x2), COLOURlovers T-Shirt (x2), Spoonflower Gift Certificate, Action Method - Journal & a Moo Mini Card Pack