AkzoNobel’s Color of the Year 2024 is Sweet Embrace, an opportunity for architects, fabricators, and coaters in the architecture and domestic appliances (DA) markets to differentiate their projects and provide a warm, calm and liberating environment for their customers amid changing times.
Sweet Embrace is a welcoming pastel pink inspired by soft feathers and evening clouds. It reflects the findings of global trends—that in an uncertain world, people are looking for belonging and reassurance. They are also in need of more peaceful environments and looking for joy in their everyday experiences.
“Choosing Sweet Embrace as our Color of the Year 2024 reflects our extensive research into global social, design and consumer trends for 2024. This research found that, in a changing environment, we’re on a quest to belong. We need places that make us feel calm, but which also provide moments of joy. Identified by our in-house paints and coatings color experts and international design professionals, these trends will influence how we choose our colors,” explains Henri Bijsterbosch, color marketing manager for AkzoNobel’s Industrial Coatings business.
AkzoNobel’s Global Aesthetic Center has created three unique palettes, or “color stories”, around the Color of the Year that are all driven by the themes of belonging, calm and joy encapsulated by Sweet Embrace.
These color stories provide an essential toolbox for customers in the construction and DA markets looking for on-trend coil and extrusion coatings to help their projects stand out.
The three color stories are:
- A warm color story – reminds us of home, a place that feels comfortable and safe, combining shades of stone, soil and clay.
- A calm color story – evokes thoughts of nature and the essence of life, bringing together the soft greens and blues of the woods and the sea.
- An uplifting color story – joyful colors that put a smile on your face and inspire imagination and creativity, with dreamy lilacs, fluid grays and modern yellows.
These themes make it easy to choose colors and combinations for a timeless look that is also on-trend, especially relevant for applications that last for many years.
“Our Color of the Year, Sweet Embrace, and its three complementary color stories, are an inspiration for great combinations of colors to create a variety of different moods. They enable us to personalize our environments to fit the times we live in, as well as bringing a sense of stability and moments of joy to our spaces. These themes make it easy for specifiers to select colors and combinations for a timeless look that’s also on trend,” says Bijsterbosch.
“Our high-quality coil and extrusion products like TRINAR, CERAM-A-STAR and POLYDURE are some of the best performing in the market. They are widely specified and used for their excellent performance, durability, color and gloss retention. Our global color experts create these colors in the right product needed for the job in hand. They can also help customers find close-matching and complementary colors from a standard assortment,” concludes Bijsterbosch.
