Avient’s ColorForward Predicts 2024 Trends of More Harmonious Colors with a Splash of Exuberance

Avient Corporation announced the release of ColorForward™ 2024, the annual color forecasting guide for the plastic industry developed by its ColorWorks team. Now in its 18th edition, the forecasting guide includes a palette of 20 colors and effects selected by a group of color, marketing, and social trend experts.

This guide is created annually to help plastic product designers, brand managers, and marketing professionals make more informed color choices.

The ColorForward team hosts an annual workshop to identify global trend stories. They then select colors and effects that are likely to be consumers’ preferred color choices in 2024 based on these trends.

“After two years of virtual workshops, we were excited to return to our traditional approach of workshops held in person with multicultural teams from every region,” said Norzihan Aziz, ColorWorks manager, Asia Pacific. “In-person interactions have different energy and make brainstorming more powerful. Being on-site at our ColorWorks facility in Singapore this year also allowed us to use our vast color chip library to finalize the 2024 color selections.” 

The four global trend stories identified by ColorForward for 2024 are: 
• Anything else??! 
• 70.2,5.0,4 
• Let it grow! 
• What about me? 

At the core of each of these stories, Avient’s experts identified the emergence of new behaviors and actions in response to recent uncertainty and challenges. This includes addressing major world crises and finding one’s happiness.

The first trend story Anything else??! reflects the sentiment that, even though new crises may arise, there is a newfound determination to make positive changes happen by sharing local resources.

In the 70.2,5.0,4 trend story, biotechnology is applied to provide potential solutions to big-scale issues like potable water scarcity, increasing food demand, and the need for cleaner energy. The name is a reference to the percentage of Earth’s surface covered by water (70%), the percentage of total freshwater on the planet (2.5%), and the percentage of freshwater that is not contaminated and hence usable and drinkable (0.4%), according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

The Let it grow! trend story chronicles the growing use of smart farming and agri-tech to achieve large-scale reforestation and more efficient crop production.

The last trend story, What about me?, recounts the search for individual happiness after times of restriction and the reclaiming of one’s life.

“Purples and greens were the main protagonists of ColorForward 2023, showing an interesting duality between the natural world and the artificial one, but there were also stark contrasting colors underlining a year of ambiguity and contrast,” said Roberto Romanin, designer at ColorWorks EMEA. “The 2024 palette is more harmonious and balanced, with colors more evenly distributed across the color spectrum and only a slight emergence of the yellow and brown families. However, we also see a trend towards bright and saturated colors to represent exuberance and human expressiveness.”