• Creating Color Palettes 2: Helen Gurura - The Making of an Exterior Color Palette
• Creating Color Palettes 3: Monika Fecht - Color Me 2008
• Creating Color Palettes 4: Monika Fecht - A World Of Contrasts (Mood Boards 2008/2009)
• Creating Color Palettes 5: Helen Gurura - A Functional Approach to Color Use

Trend as a cultural reflex – following a train of thought

Text by Frank Stein

Collages by Monika Fecht

How do color stylists create the color palettes for next year's products? In the first of a new series, Monika Fecht, Head of Design Management at Renolit, shows us the mood boards she developed to create the colors for 2007. Click onto the photos to get better quality images.

Are trends created? Something thought up by a sworn group of profiteers, leading consumers by the nose-ring of supposedly free purchase decisions? Conspiracy theoreticians may like to think so. But even if it is the trend scouts themselves who lay the trail, they are nevertheless enmeshed in an intertextual situation, from which they cannot escape.

Blue is coming back. But not the ringing-in of the 1980’s. It is a southern blue, evoking the worlds of color and form of the Orient. Green, too, is changing from the military to the tropical look. It is becoming more muted, more elegant. We feel the call of the South and the Unknown.

The days of the classical deep, brilliant red-tones (carmine) with a slight blue tinge are vanishing in favour of more restrained, more yellowish red-tones (vermilion) or violet-tones with a high proportion of blue (violet). The new red-tones are combined with dark or earth-colored woodgrains.

Perhaps black and white (especially white) is the trend of the coming years. This trend willingly displays itself in fine, in part playful patterns, but also in extensive designs – recalling Courrèges. Combined with warm metallic tones (gold/brass), this style, which is in fact rather cool and emotionless, becomes warm and mysterious.

“No-no-yellow” – as the color experts say – the new yellow, that was first seen in China. The obvious green or blue element in this yellow was for a long time considered taboo, especially in interior design. But in combination with dark woodgrains, this color, so long despised, is becoming a genuine option, imaginable even beyond the limits of “Young Living.”

Originally published in frank.stein magazine. Reproduced by kind permission of Monika Fecht and Frank Stein.

Update: Monika Fecht returns to explain her process in detail