Are Color Trends Important in Product Design?Color can have a huge emotional impact on customers, but that doesn't mean you need to change your product line to follow trends. Here are the elements of color theory you should consider.
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Emotional resonance is key to successfuldesign. Consider color: Its influence begins in childhood, when you probably picked your favorite. "It's really multilayered, the human reaction to color," says Courtney Garvin, an Atlanta-based graphic designer whose senior thesis at Yale concerned color theory. "There's the physical aspect--what happens optically, what happens in the brain. Then you have cultural associations, personal connotations and on and on."
Entire organizations are devoted to forecasting color trends; the best-known is the Color Institute, run by Pantone, whose color-matching system is the standard for printing and industrial design. The group selected Emerald as color of the year for 2013.
