• Creating Color Palettes: Monika Fecht - Trend As A Cultural Reflex (Mood Boards 2007)
• Creating Color Palettes 2: Helen Gurura - The Making of an Exterior Color Palette
• Review of I Saloni 2007
• 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
• XYMARA Design Award Jury bio - Monika Fecht
• XYMARA Design Award Sponsor - RENOLIT
• Creating Color Palettes 6: The Business of Color at RENOLIT
• Creating Color Palettes 7: Monika Fecht - Discover yourself!
• Creating Color Palettes 8: Monika Fecht - Transmission – Color Road 10/11
• Creating Color Palettes 9: Patricia Verlodt - What is the color over the rainbow?
• Creating Color Palettes 10: Monika Fecht - Colour Road 10/11

Color me 2008

By Ania Dardas

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How do color stylists create the color palettes for next year's products? In the third of our series, Monika Fecht, Head of Design Management at Renolit AG in Worms, Germany, returns to explain her pathway to inspiration.

“The city is the inspiration for 2008: urban architecture and forms, urban materials, cement, stone, gray, black and white with layers that gleam and cast a fine shimmering net over the whole,” states Monika Fecht,. She points to her mood boards that are a collage of images and objects from fashion, industry and nature. These mood boards represent one of the final steps in the several-month-long process of selecting the colors that will be produced by Renolit in 2008 for their PVC foils.

PVC wood grains

Renolit is the world leader in PVC film production. The films are used for window frames and furniture components as well as other applications.  Monika Fecht is responsible for design management in the two primary business areas, which means that she develops or selects the design of all new PVC films produced by the company. Approximately 80 percent of her work is based around the selection of wood grains. Wood grain effects are still the most popular choice for furniture and kitchens and the technology for their production is so good that it is often hard to tell high-end PVC film from the real thing. One of the telling hints is that nowadays it has become very popular to take a wood grain pattern and alter it by, for example, removing all the knots to leave fine vertical lines or by reproducing a traditional wood like cherry but in a color that doesn’t appear in nature such as pale gray. As a trained carpenter who ran her own carpenter’s shop for several years, Monika Fecht was not initially attracted by the idea of working with PVC films but became fascinated by the processes involved and was gradually drawn away from world of real wood into that of pvc wood reproductions and innovations.

The annual color adventure

The other major aspect of Monika Fecht’s work is the annual selection of 15 or so colors for matt PVC films that will be applied to items from the furniture industry. The color selection process she goes through every year is a journey to a largely unknown destination.

“The process probably begins with the annual fair in Milan. That’s the one to which everyone – printers, designers, boardmakers and furniture manufacturers – goes to in order to see what is new and which way the trend is going,” explains Monika, “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that their colors or designs will all be right for the northern European market.”

The annual Milan Design Week (I Saloni) trade fair is the first step. The next step is the launch of an annual process she goes through with a consultant from Paris who works in the fashion industry. Monika’s consultant provides her with the background on where color is heading in fashion – the process begins much earlier each year for the fashion industry – as well as many collages and color chips.

Collages point the way

The collages are as interesting for the images and colors they gather as for their sourcing. For example, a photograph for a high-end cosmetic advertisement makes use of a strongly reflecting LED aqua green – alone it looks a little like it comes from another world and on the collage it is joined by an image of a deep anthracite sea with charcoal clouds on the horizon splashed with a yellowish green sunset. The feeling is one of urban decay and this family of greens was one that at first made Monika feel very uncomfortable.

“Initially I dismissed it as unworkable, but then it began to come up again and again – it’s like when you try hard not to think of elephants. In the end that’s all you can think of,” says Monika. She describes how she began to see it everywhere – in nature, industry and fashion. That is the signal to start collecting and collating samples: scraps of material, strands of wool, images from magazines, small objects. Monika does this for every color that she thinks might be interesting for the coming year. “The process is hard work and it takes at least four months, but a lot of it takes place at the level of the subconscious once it has been launched.”

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