Features
EyeEm's Color Of The Year 2022: Purple
By EyeEm Team - 3 min read
This isn't a color selected at random on a pinwheel dartboard, this is a color with meaning, with depth, and with significance beyond your first impression.
As usual, EyeEm was first to market with the Color Of The Year (yep, even before Pantone 😉) in our Visual Trends Report for 2022 (download it for free here if you haven’t already).
As we explore new dual realities and blending of virtual and physical worlds, the color purple will feature heavily in visual representations of everything from artificial landscapes and nature, to the Metaverse and otherworldly imagery. A true in-between, purple is an artificial mix in itself.
Is purple positive or negative? Childlike or sophisticated? Playful and cheerful or deep and profound? It is a color we can’t quite put our finger on and yet which animates our creative spirit. Spotted in gaming platforms popular among Gen Z, as well as with roots in the natural world, it’s not just the visual arts which are in for a purple-tinted 2022 - it’s also a key player in the fashion and beauty forecasts for the year ahead.
Embracing dual realities
Embracing the overarching theme of EyeEm’s visual trends for 2022 - dual realities - the color purple is a true in-between. As an artificial mix of blue and red, it embodies the values it aims to represent. A mix of connotations, the color purple goes beyond our everyday reality and embraces the unnatural and otherworldly.
Featuring in visual representations of everything from artificial landscapes and nature to the Metaverse, the Color of the Year is reflective of what is happening in the world around us. Amidst the uncertainties of 2020 and 2021, a color that embraces different emotions or sensitivities in various contexts captures and symbolises the global zeitgeist of the moment.
Let’s paint the town purple
Color is a critical form of communication. A step up from ‘mellow yellow’, which made our color trend predictions of 2021, the complexity of the color purple reflects the global innovation and transformation taking place in both the physical and digital realms.
At once calming and stimulating, embracing uncertainty and cautious optimism, we believe it is the perfect color to represent our feelings about an uncertain future. Here’s to 2022.