Meet the People Who Decide What Design Trends Will Dominate Each Year

There is no crystal ball at the Pantone offices that allows the company to see into the future and glean enough insights to declare its annual Color of the Year. The team has something better: Leatrice Eiseman. As executive director of the Pantone Color Institute for almost 38 years and founder of the Eiseman Center for Color Information and Training, Eiseman’s job is to predict upcoming color and design trends alongside a highly skilled team of trend forecasters and colorists. "It’s not just a random choice made by a group of people sitting around," Eiseman says. "It’s not fluff. We tune in and ask: What is it that’s driving the world around us? What’s the zeitgeist we’re feeling out there?"

The art of year-ahead trend forecasting is complex, nuanced, and almost impossible to boil down to one neat process, in large part because the very nature of trend predicting involves research and interpretation, data and human emotion, creativity and science. Consumer trend analysts have their eyes and ears to the ground at all times, keeping a pulse on everything from popular art, cosmetics, and home decor, to major sports events, Netflix hits, and viral social media hashtags to comb out new influences. Their methodologies are informed by in-depth research—and the creative ability to analyze what it all means to take an educated guess about what might come next. "You look at the past, the present, and the future," says trend analyst and creative researcher Elisabeth Muñoz Lopez, who works on Pantone’s Color View Planner, an online tool that offers in-depth color and trend forecasts across a variety of industries with suggested applications for styling and color-mixing. "All of this translates into lifestyle trends—new chromatic ranges are born; you sense textures or identify colors that have continuity. Everything is linked to the aesthetic universe."

Decades ago, when Eiseman began her work as a color specialist, there were a lot of naysayers. "People would say, ‘Who cares about color?’" she recalls. "Now, I’m not getting that so much." Today, Pantone’s Color of the Year program, which Eiseman helped kick off in 1999 (almost 15 years after she also helped form the Pantone Color Institute), is a hotly anticipated announcement in the design world and among the general public.

To choose Pantone’s 2023 Color of the Year, Viva Magenta, Eiseman and her team found inspiration in a lot of disparate places, including the colorful, Regency era interiors in the hit period-drama TV series Bridgerton, an ongoing divisive political landscape, and even a unique insect species known as cochineal bugs, which have been harvested to produce natural dyes (often a deep-reddish color) to color food, textiles, and cosmetics for centuries; a method that’s regaining attention and interest as sustainable production methods become a greater collective focus. "We are still coming out of this awful time; we need energy, we need dynamism, we need excitement," Eiseman says. "When I was looking for symbolism, I thought, [this bug] has existed for years. I mean, if anything could be brought to extinction, think about this vulnerable little creature who could be crushed very easily, and yet, look how long it’s lasted."

While the Pantone team is very tight-lipped about how their Color of the Year selection process actually works, an informational page on the company’s website describes the undertaking as "a culmination of the macro-level color trend forecasting and research that the global team involved with the Pantone Color Institute conducts year-round." Within hours of the annual announcement, how-to articles start pouring in across the design and lifestyle spheres with tips for applying Pantone’s pick to your home or wardrobe, like "The Viva Magenta Lipstick You Need" or "5 Viva Magenta Glasswares to Buy Now." The response to Pinterest’s annual trend forecast, Pinterest Predicts, is similar.

Amiyra Perkins, senior lead of creative strategy at Pinterest, brought her expertise to the company after working on strategic direction at consumer trend-forecasting behemoth WGSN for a few years prior. At both companies, Perkins says data of course plays a significant role in the early process of identifying a trend, but after that comes the hard work of figuring out whether the trend is fleeting or here to stay. "I like to look at the vitality of a trend, the longevity, the roots, the drivers—what’s causing this trend to outrank others or even cause a moment of pause and reflection," Perkins says. "This is where a trend has true staying power, when it taps into fundamental shifts in behaviors versus large surges in popularity."

The behind-the-scenes approach for Pinterest’s year-ahead trend report may begin with data, but the analysis that follows—focused on fundamental behavior shifts—is where the real magic lies, and where the lasting trends emerge. "The process behind Pinterest Predicts is actually based on months of data [and] rigorous analysis and evaluation by a cross-functional team of Pinterest employees," says Perkins. In the first stage of the forecasting process, Pinterest’s analysts go through billions of English-language queries from all over the world, analyzing over two-year periods with a score system the company developed that uses modeling to help pinpoint trends at the point of inception and then forecast what’s likely to trend in the future.

Next, Pinterest’s teams of writers, designers, researchers, and strategists come together during the company’s Insights Making Week to distill around 500,000 of these search terms into roughly 50 distinct trends, while experts like Perkins look at what’s happening in the world try to get to the bottom of the shifts in behavior that may be at the heart of these trends in consideration—or the "why" behind them. More often than not, they get it right. A Pinterest Predicts blog post claims: "Eight out of ten trends we called came true three years in a row thanks to our robust methodology and analysis." (The final report typically outlines about 30 trend predictions.)

Much like Pantone, Pinterest doesn’t need a crystal ball to see into the future—they have other (arguably more reliable) methods. "Data alone doesn’t always tell the whole story, but the way we contextualize the data is what makes this report so riveting," says Perkins. "What we know is that people come to Pinterest to plan, and because they’re designing everything from daily dinners to milestone moments, we get early signals on what’s coming next. It’s [a] direct insight into what’s likely to be really big, really soon."

In 2023, Pinterest’s team of forecasters see a few trends coming down the pipeline for home design, including spa-like bathrooms, fantastical, fungi-inspired decor, and "hipstoric homes" filled with vintage hand-me-downs. After Pantone’s Viva Magenta dominates in the new year, Lopez suspects yellows will be big in 2024—but most of us will have to wait for the company’s next Color of the Year announcement to find out.

Top photo by Aleksandar Nakic / Getty Images.

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