Colors have a unique way of bringing life and vibrancy to everything around us. Imagine an outdoor countryside setting on a crisp spring morning – stunning, right? Now, think about what makes it so captivating. It’s the colors, isn’t it? They play an essential role in how we perceive beauty and respond to the world around us.
This is precisely why color trends hold such significance in graphic design.
Several influential picks have emerged for the 2025 Color of the Year, each reflecting key themes and inspirations.
Let us guide you through these exciting selections and explore how embracing these color trends can elevate your 2025 graphic design projects.
First up, we have for you the 2025 Color of the Year by Little Greene. Little Greene is a British paint and wallpaper brand known for its eco-friendly, high-quality products and historically-inspired color palettes. It’s a favorite for timeless and premium interior design.
And for the 2025 Color of the Year, they have selected Mochi, a delightfully neutral hue. It’s an excellent choice for use in any contemporary or traditional design setting thus making it a versatile color for graphic designers to use.
It’s especially a great color for brands who want to exude a sense of luxury.
Imagine this color used on a website paired with black and white and other complementary colors. It would be the embodiment of luxury.
It would also be a great addition to suitable product packaging with just the right touch of copper or rose gold accents.
If your industry and the overall brand tone allow, this 2025 Color of the Year by Little Greene is a great choice to include or build upon in your graphic design ventures.
Next up we have Graham & Brown’s 2025 Color of the Year. But first, let’s get the introductions out of the way. Graham & Brown is a renowned UK brand offering stylish wallpaper, paint, and home décor. It’s celebrated for blending timeless elegance with contemporary design.
They have chosen Elderton as the 2025 Color of the Year. The aim here was to choose an earthy color mimicking natural elements. And because of this neutral brown color much like Mochi, it’s an excellent choice for brands looking to add a touch of sophistication. On the other hand, when used correctly with other colors like deep greens and blues it would also work well for rugged settings.
Similarly, there are many ways to creatively incorporate this 2025 Color of the Year into your upcoming graphic design projects.
And the best way to find out if it’s your color is to experiment with it and see what combinations help speak your brand’s goals and vision into being.
A leader in spray paint innovation, Krylon also brings to the table their own 2025 Color of the Year selection. Krylon typically offers a wide range of high-quality coatings for DIY projects, crafts, and industrial use. Their products are known for their vibrant colors and durable finishes.
Krylon’s 2025 Color of the Year is Hammered Black – and it needs to be addressed, there are in fact differences between blacks. This particular black almost looks like a touch of blue, green, and white was added to it. There’s also a nice matt finish to the color that makes it excellent for tech and fashion brands.
Hammered black stands out from the 2025 Color of the Year selections on this list as being the most versatile color because of its extensive use cases. There are so many ways you can use this color.
For example, it would look great on websites, and on logos, and it would even look great on OOH advertising surfaces because of how strikingly the color would appear.
A good designer paired with a brand strategist would know just what to do with a special color like this, opting it in place of the usual black.
The next 2025 Color of the Year is presented by STAINMASTER. They are a trusted brand specializing in stain-resistant carpets, flooring, and home cleaning products. They’re known for their excellent and durable color selections.
STAINMASTER has picked Truffle as their 2025 Color of the Year. Truffle is an excellent pick for those of you who want to experiment with a range of styles. It’s one of those colors that work for both modern minimalism as well as rustic chic. It’s also a color that layers beautifully with soft neutral hues to deep bold palettes.
The other good thing about this color is that you can either use it as a primary color and use bright accents or pair it as a secondary color to complement other suitable colors.
It would also work well on websites and other graphic design material as well.
Thus, STAINMASTER’s 2025 Color of the Year is definitely one that you can experiment with this year.
Dunn-Edwards is a premium paint manufacturer known for its high-performance, eco-friendly coatings. So it’s no surprise that it’s a top choice for professionals and homeowners in the Western U.S.
Their 2025 Color of the Year is called Caramelized. Judging by this list of every 2025 Color of the Year, warm shades seem to dominate. Caramelized also falls into this warm shades category and shows itself as a top pick for 2025.
Dunn-Edwards dubs their 2025 Color of the Year as “the new neutral”. The warm terracotta brown is reminiscent of sunbaked clay which can be used for both rugged and high-end brands.
If you feel like going against the wind of typical tech-based colors this warm earthy tone is a top choice. In fact, according to a study, many consumers now prefer low-saturated colors like this as they promote a sense of eco-friendliness.
So if that’s your goal as a brand – to be perceived as eco-friendly then use that psychology of colors to communicate that to your audience. And use Caramelized by Dunn-Edwards or be inspired by it for your color palette.
The next 2025 Color of the Year is called Raku and it’s the pick by C2 Paint. C2 Paint is a boutique paint brand offering premium, handcrafted colors with exceptional depth and quality. It’s renowned for its commitment to artistry and innovative color formulations and its 2025 Color of the Year is a testament to that.
Raku is a rich and deep red that leans towards an earthy color, set on the same trajectory that most color trends for 2025 are headed. This almost burnt-red beautiful hue is an inspiration derived from the centuries-old pottery technique used in tea ceremonies in ancient Japan.
For luxury brands as well as food and beverage brands, the right use of this 2025 Color of the Year can be a graphic design game changer.
The next 2025 Color of the Year we’re looking into is the pick by Benjamin Moore a leading paint company known for its high-quality, durable products and an extensive range of vibrant colors.
Here’s another earthy color for you to choose from in 2025. This heathered plum and velvety brown is a perfect balance of class and whimsy. Cinnamon Slate is 1 out of 10 in part of Benjamin Moore’s color palette trends for 2025 where all the colors are nature-inspired hues.
This particular color paired well with grey, rose gold, muted gold, and even black to create a whimsical yet modern outlook. It could be a great pick for some brands who like to use violet or purple in their brand’s color palette but don’t want to come off as whimsical or cartoonish.
It’s a serious and grounded hue of its category and can be used across different industries when mixed with the right set of colors as mentioned before.
Valspar is a globally recognized paint brand offering a wide range of affordable, high-quality paints and coatings. Their 2025 Color of the Year stands out as a unique but inspiring selection in this list. Encore, as the color is named, is an atmospheric blue. It’s named Encore, as Blue is making its comeback this year.
Valspar describes Encore as a color with saturation and a touch of violet helping it shine in both digital and physical spaces.
There are many ways this 2025 Color of the Year can be used in graphic design. If you’re rolling out a new brand, a blue logo using Encore is a good choice. Blue is the most popular logo color. And you might find it unsurprising that 39% of logos of Fortune 500 companies mainly use blue in their logo.
One other reason to use Encore is that it pairs well with so many other unique colors like tanned leather, mint green, and some of the other colors on this list like Elderton and Truffle. These colors help manage the intensity of the blue.
So if you’re a marketer or brand owner dying to bring back blue, then Encore is the way to go.
Glidden is a household name. But just to present them in the right way, they are a well-known paint brand offering affordable, reliable products for both DIYers and professionals. It is recognized for its easy-to-use paints and a wide variety of colors.
And this year, they bring out another purple to the 2025 Color of the Year mix. Purple Basil is much more pigmented than Cinnamon Slate. But the right color combinations can help balance the richness of this high-impact, warm color. The above image acts as an example of how the right colors help achieve this balance.
Purple Basil can be used across various industries. Whether you’re in the tech industry or the food and beverage there are ways you can manipulate color palettes to get them to communicate the brand tone you’re going for.
If you feel like the colors are too saturated, you can add more bright colors to the mix to balance it out as required. Or else, one other good use of Purple Basil is to treat it as an accent color in a lighter color palette. You’d be surprised at how good purple color schemes will look!
This is the beauty of colors, you can manipulate them as required to get it to work for you.
Dutch Boy Paints is a trusted American paint brand known for its durable, high-quality coatings and wide range of colors. It’s popular for both residential and commercial painting projects. They’ve announced quite a unique blue color as their 2025 Color of the Year.
Mapped Blue as shown above is a soft, calming blue. This medium-tone blue with slight yellow undertones helps transcend any design to a modern trendy piece.
It’s noteworthy that this color pairs well with other muted colors to form beautifully calming color palettes. Such color palettes can be used for a variety of industries from kids brands to health and beauty care brands.
Or if you’re a luxury brand wanting to use this color then off-white with a mix of muted or rose gold accents would unimaginably elevate the color palette to a luxurious and sophisticated one.
Besides, blue as we mentioned before is a popular color and it is a powerful color in marketing.
So be sure to creatively incorporate Mapped Blue into your 2025 designs or your brand’s color palette for maximum impact.
Pantone is a global color authority known for its standardized color-matching system used in design, printing, and manufacturing. This system helps ensure consistency across various industries and mediums.
Their 2025 Color of the Year is Mocha Mousse. And as most of these color authorities have concluded, Pantone also concludes the color of the year to be similar in hue to the others. This shows that there is in fact a pattern to these color trends.
Speaking about Mocha Mousse, the name itself is an indication of the color and its richness. Without actually seeing the color one can imagine what it might look like. Regardless of that, this warming brown hue connects us with the delectability of chocolate and coffee and the comfort it offers.
But besides this delectability, there’s a luxurious feel to this color that can be further accentuated by the choice of color combinations. You can take it into a whole other dimension of sophistication and elegance by pairing it with rich jewel tones like emerald green or sapphire blue, or by softening its warmth with muted pastels like blush pink or dusty lavender.
You can take from that, how this 2025 Color of the Year by Pantone can be a formidable force to help craft mesmerizing graphic designs that set you apart from your competition.
Behr’s 2025 Color of the Year is Rumors, adding another reddish-brown color to the list. Behr is a leading paint brand offering high-quality, durable products for interior and exterior applications. They are widely known for their vivid color selection and excellent coverage.
Sticking to the trend of earthy hues, Behr’s Rumors is a different take on C2’s Raku. While Raku leans more toward clay colors, Rumors is more of a deep and dynamic ruby red.
What’s amazing is that this color is a fresh take on a classic red popular in the 1990s. The highlight is that Behr balances it out by leaning towards modern earthy tones that will trend this year.
This color pairs well with neutral colors and can be used across different industries from high-end restaurant brands to rustic or traditional settings.
It can be a great color for striking logos and can also work as an accent color in web design.
Brand owners and marketers can team up to figure out how best this 2025 Color of the Year by Behr can have a positive impact on their designs this year.
Minwax is a well-known brand specializing in wood care products, including stains, finishes, and varnishes. It is recognized for enhancing the beauty and durability of wood surfaces.
They too have come forward with a color of the year for 2025. Their pick is Violet. This jewel tone is perfectly in line with the rest of the color selections on this list.
With maximalist trends on the rise, it should come as no surprise that such a vibrant color with personality should be named a 2025 color of the year.
Violet can be paired with both muted colors as well as bright colors depending on the brand tone you want to communicate to your audience.
It will also look good on various graphic design materials when used as an accent color – especially for text on a high-contrast background. It elevates as opposed to just using black text.
Similarly, there are many ways good designers can help you incorporate Violet into your graphic design projects for 2025.
The Color of the Year is a highly anticipated announcement made annually by major color authorities and brands. These 2025 Color of the Year selections are not arbitrary; they are carefully chosen based on extensive research into global trends, cultural shifts, and emerging consumer preferences. Factors like societal moods, technological advancements, and environmental themes often influence these choices as you can see from these picks.
For creative industries, these colors are more than just trends – they set the tone for design, marketing, and branding for the year ahead. They inspire everything from fashion collections to interior decor, product packaging, and branding becoming a unifying element that resonates across industries. Recognizing these colors helps businesses and creatives stay aligned with the zeitgeist, ensuring their work feels fresh and relevant.
So go ahead and incorporate one or more of these 2025 colors of the year into your graphic design projects and see the magic happen!
