bloom's blog

What's caught our eye in 2011

2011 has been a strange year. There's been continuing economic turmoil, an Arab spring and a Euro autumn, interspersed with a fairy tale Royal Wedding and an eagerly anticipated feast of celebration with the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee. We take a look back through the year and pick out 10 events, products and campaigns that have made us sit up and go wow or simply put a smile on our faces.

1. A beautiful CSR campaign

You can put your name to a star, a number plate or a stone in Wembley Way, but now, thanks to Dulux and UNICEF’s partnership, you can also own a colour. For a donation of at least £1 you get to choose a colour from a range of 16.7 million available on the average screen monitor. All proceeds go to UNICEF's campaign to bring clean water, education, medical assistance and other aid to children across the world. 

UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador Sir Roger Moore is a proud new owner of Swedish Blue, the colour of the flag of his wife’s homeland Sweden, and not far off the cyan blue that represents UNICEF. “Both Kristina and UNICEF are extremely close to my heart”.

ownacolour.com

And the official colour of 2012 is…

Our world is about to become a lot more vibrant according to Pantone. The Pantone Colour Institute has named “Tangerine Tango”  a luminous red-orange, as the colour of 2012. The colour experts have been steadily steering towards this hue over recent years. Turquoise was the chosen colour in 2010, meant to help us escape from the everyday troubles of the world and it was Honeysuckle in 2011, a colour to lift our life spirits and instil confidence.
As we struggle on through turbulent times, the powers that be have opted for a bold outlook to this coming year. Pantone has turned to the “spirited reddish-orange” hue to “provide the energy boost we need to recharge and move-forward”. Orange not only signalises vitality but also urgency and strength.

“There’s an element of encouragement with orange” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Colour Institute. “It’s building on the ideas of courage and action, that we want to move on to better things.”

The colour of the year selection is a very thoughtful process. Pantone searches the world for colour influences across the entertainment industry, films currently in production, travelling art collections, hot new artists and popular travel destinations.

Will it be a feature colour in our lives in 2012? It’s too early to say yet, but this vibrant shade is already
starting to appear on catwalks of Alexander McQueen, Oscar de la Renta and Céline, to name but a few.  

So which brands have already seen the future and adopted tangerine tango as their own? Here’s a short selection…

 

Which other brands/examples can you think of?