What’s your favourite colour? It’s a question we’ve asked everyone we’ve interviewed since Design Geek was founded almost seven years ago. Answers have varied from People Will Always Need Plates co-founder Hannah Dipper’s “Rocker Yellow – the dirty yellow of an Eames Rocker, roughly 610C” (yes, that’s a Pantone reference!) to Philippe Starck who told us that asking him to choose a favourite colour was like asking a composer to chose a favourite note! So we don’t envy GF Smith’s recently launched campaign to find the world’s favourite colour.
Design heavy-weights like Camille Walala (above), Bethan Laura Wood (bottom) and Mulberry’s Johnny Coca (below) have already weighed in and now it’s your turn. Visit worldsfavouritecolour.com and move your cursor around their smart interactive tool until you hit upon the perfect hue – then click and it’s yours! Design Geek’s editor has already claimed “Treggiden Yellow.”
The campaign, the first global survey of its kind, aims to answer questions like ‘Do colour preferences change across ages?’, ‘Are boys really blue and girls really pink?’, ‘Are hotter countries drawn to warmer or cooler colours?’, ‘Is there is a link between colour preference and decisiveness?’ (as indicated by user response times) and crucially: ‘What colour are we now – is there a shade that reflects the globalised world of the 21st century; a colour for the age of digital communication, transnational culture, democratised manufacture, resurgent populism and crowdsourced creativity?’
“No longer limited to a local or national poll, our ambition was to ask a global audience through social media,” says Made Thought’s Ben Parker. “Colour is believed to be the most important visual experience to human beings, and so this project aims to get people to think about colour and the importance of it in our lives.”
The most popular colour will be unveiled at the ‘Paper City’ exhibition in G . F Smith’s home city of Hull, as part of its City of Culture 2017 celebrations in July. The ‘World’s Favourite Colour’ will be introduced as the 51st colour in G . F Smith’s Colorplan range, and will bear the name of the person who has picked the shade closest to the overall favourite. As well as the honour of having the most popular colour in the world named after them, the winner and a friend will be invited to G . F Smith’s mill in the Lake District to watch their paper being produced, and take home a full suite of personalised stationery in their eponymous colour. So, what are you waiting for – go and tell the world what your favourite colour is – as long as it’s not Treggiden yellow, that one’s taken!
