The blue that is on everyone’s mind, Classic Blue, the Pantone Color of the Year 2020, is nothing like the blues we all dread. The colour is instead suggestive of the sky at dusk and rings in the promise of the return of a new day.

The big revelation was a dreamy, straight out of a Van Gogh-starry night landscape affair, hosted at the ARTECHOUSE digital art space in New York’s Chelsea Market.

The colour transpired into a multi-sensorial immersive experience, bringing to life its many avatars which were seen, tasted, heard, smelled and felt by touch.

The enigmatic visual experience was created by the creative team at ARTECHOUSE in collaboration with Pantone. Swirling digital patterns in Classic Blue transformed the space, and made it look like a fascinating canvas that caught everybody’s attention. INTUS, a Mexico-based company run by co-founder Gil Castro, produced an hour and a half of visual content for the evening. Castro, who used trow technologies to simulate spiritual and meditative moments in Classic Blue, referred to it as a 'special colour’.

Pantone, that provides universal language of colour to brands and manufacturers, collaborated with a number of sensory experts from the fields of technology, music, fashion, beauty and food. The idea was to inspire creatives and consumers to think about colour differently, to uncover new associations, and to encourage them to create new experiences and connect with the hue in their own unique ways.

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The evening also manifested immersive visuals of the previous Color of the Year, which includes Ultra Violet (2018), Mimosa (2009), and Tigerlily (2004).

Offering visual inspirations in Classic Blue, Adobe Stock – an endless resource for creatives seeking imagery and essential design components – created a mood board of engrossing references.

Reaffirming colour as a critical form of communication and driver of businesses, FedEx Office – a subsidiary of FedEx Corp that provides convenient, state-of-the-art printing, packing and shipping services – joined Pantone in celebrating the monumental reveal. Using its colour matching and print technologies, FedEx Office brought the past Color of the Year to life with a multi-dimensional print installation.

Bringing music to understand the enduring colour, AudioUX, a next gen audio brand agency, created ‘Vivid Nostalgia’. The sound, as the name suggests, takes one to a place of nostalgia, comfort and familiarity.

Weaving a flavourful and olfactory analogy of Classic Blue, Firmenich - a privately-owned perfume and taste company - crafted a natural, fresh blueberry taste, and a unique fragrance symbolising the meeting of sky and sea.

Tapping on texture, a digitally native home furnishing brand, named The Inside, developed a custom Pantone Color of the Year 2020 fabric that embodied the spirit of the colour in touch.

Expressing itself in diverse mediums, the Classic Blue at the launch event surely left a lasting imprint on the minds of people, and made a mark of being more than just a colour. The colour is already in trends, finding unique expressions and diverse applications across textiles, fashion, interior design and graphic design, and is here to stay.

The colour experts at the Pantone Color Institute decide the colour each year after combing the world looking for new colour influences and inspiration. Reflecting on the criteria behind the selection for 2020, Laurie Pressman, Vice President of the institute, said that it ‘highlights the relationship between trends in colour and what is taking place in our global culture at a moment in time, a colour that reflects what individuals feel they need that colour can hope to answer’, a colour that promises to take away anxiety and offers a ‘stable foundation from which to build on.’