The world eagerly awaits Pantone’s Color of the Year each year and I am definitely a member of that club! I had the privilege of attending the reveal for 2019’s color in Miami at Art Basel and as luck would have it, I got to attend 2023’s Color of the Year as well–what a treat! This time I partnered with Spoonflower to create a pattern in the new color that was revealed at the event. Let me walk you through Viva Magenta!

Pantone color of the year: Viva Magenta!

The Pantone Color Institute announced their color of the year at Art Basel in Miami in December. I had the privilege to attend the reveal at Artechouse and it was a beautiful homage to the vibrant color of the year. In fact, if you’d like to see the reveal for yourself, you can view it here.

Everyone awaited the big reveal as we listened to the Leatrice Eisman’s, head of Pantone, thoughts about the importance of color–something you know I’m fully in support of. Once the color was announced we explored the Artechouse galleries, which celebrated the color.

Now, how do I factor into all of this?

Spoonflower x Pantone Color of the Year

A couple of weeks prior to the event we were invited to collaborate with Spoonflower, one of our favorite, long-time partners, to create a pattern inspired by Pantone’s Color of the Year. Even though it was our busiest time of the year and the turnaround was CRAZY tight, I had to say yes. I mean, what choice did I have?! When it comes to color, I say YES!

Here’s the thing, they didn’t tell us what the color was!

Keeping Pantone’s Color of the Year on the down low

They gave us color codes to work with, I’m guessing so that it wasn’t easy to track down and figure out if it came into the wrong hands. It was all so covert.

We translated all of the codes into colors and here’s what we had to work with:

In fact, our turnaround was so tight that I was trying to deduce all the colors at stoplights on my way home and it was VERY tricky to do it on a phone let me tell you.

Our assignment was to interpret Pantone’s ethos that speaks to the following:

Bravery to break boundaries
Fearless optimism
An endless new ecosystem emerging in the world
Pantone’s pillars this year are Art + Design and Science + Tech

So, of course, we created a pattern inspired by beautiful bold blooms and went to town incorporating their colors.

Here’s a screenshot of some of the combos we were playing around with, again, not knowing which was the actual color.

Viva Magenta

We gave Spoonflower a ton of options to work with and didn’t know exactly what they were going to use them for but they requested on that was large in repeat and one that was smaller and more suitable to dinnerware.

When I arrived at the event in Miami, I couldn’t wait to see how they had used the selected patterns. I had somewhat of a hunch of what it might be, just because Magenta was such a knockout out of bunch, but, of course, I didn’t know for sure.

After Viva Magenta was in fact announced (yay!), they led me up to gallery where they had installed our wallpaper in the color, which you can see behind me here. I hadn’t yet seen it so I was getting the big reveal at this precise moment.

And voila! There she is! Ha!

And, of course, we had to have some fun in front of it!

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Spoonflower artists

I was one of 6 artists invited to participate and everyone did such an amazing job! Some had very specific themes to work with, like

Jeanetta Gonzalez, who I met years ago at Alt Summit. Hi Jeanetta!
Elishka Jepson of Robyrider who is a legit rocket scientist by day and pattern designer at night. She created a design inspired by STEM. So amazing.
Cecilia Mok, who is based in Sydney, Australia and wasn’t able to come. We missed you!
Virginia Odeon
Judy Quintero of Shop Cabin

You can read more about the artists here on the Spoonflower blog.