Fill Your Designs with These Trending Colors

Using trending colors is a great way to keep your designs fresh and your clients excited.

In this post, we’ll showcase Color of the Year selections from some of the most popular color manufacturers in the world. You’ll also learn how to easily create custom palettes featuring these colors in Vectorworks Architect.

2023’s Color of the Year selections focused on hues found in nature. This trend continues into this year, but as Kesoon Chance, an interior architecture expert, pointed out,“2024’s colors are leaning more towards refreshing one’s spirits and calmness.”

As you can see from the GIF above, blue, soft, and natural tones like Krylon’s“Bluebird” or Valspar’s“Renew Blue” dominate this year’s crop of fashionable colors.

Other Colors to be on the lookout for in 2024 include:

• Behr“Cracked Pepper”
• Benjamin Moore“Blue Nova”
• Dulux“Sweet Embrace”
• Dunn Edwards“Skipping Stones”
• Dutch Boy“Ironside"
• Glidden“Limitless”
• Pantone“Peach Fuzz”
• Sherwin Williams“Upward”

The use of color, whether it be this year’s Color of the Year picks or another of your choosing, can be an effective emotive element of your next project — as Wassily Kandinsky, the celebrated painter and color theorist, wrote, “Color is a power which directly influences the soul.”

Once you decide which of the 2024 Colors of the Year you want to include in your next project, you can create a custom color palette in Vectorworks Architect with the Color Palette Manager.

These palettes are easy to create, and you have plenty of color code systems to choose from: Hex, RGB, CYMK, Grayscale, and the eyedropper tool.

Additionally, Vectorworks hosts a wide range of manufacturer paint colors, like the ones mentioned above, available for instant use.

With the Color Palette Manager, which is located under Tools> Utilities, you’ll benefit from creating a cohesive design that uses the colors from a shared color palette. The Color Palette Manager is also useful for organizing and storing company brand colors.

For more on creating and editing custom color palettes, click the button below:

CUSTOM PALETTES IN VECTORWORKS ARCHITECT

Incorporating trending colors in your designs can spark inspiration, and looking even further into the future can do the same.

NCS Colour, for example, inspires designers by releasing their Colour Trends reports. The Vectorworks Gold Partner recently launched their 2025+ report, which “promises a year of big contrasts.”

The four trend directions include Gaia, “a tribute to nature and water focusing on blue and green tones;” On & Off, in which “light and dark hues are combined by two chromatic colors that symbolize unity;” Inner, a combination of tones “that evoke emotions of comfort, warmth, and joy;” and Ethereal, a concept that blends “light and airy aesthetics with technology.”

With a NCS+ Pro paid subscription in Vectorworks 2024, you can work digitally with color to identify, define, and visualize color choices.

Here are a few things you need to know:

• NCS Colour concepts can help build mood and inspiration boards in the early design phases, helping you set the tone for a project.
• NCS+ Pro allows you to integrate color concepts into Vectorworks quickly and in an automated way, right into your Vectorworks Color Palette Manager. This saves time in developing color schemes and design iteration.
• You can install the plugin via the Install Partner Product command (Help > Install Partner Products) within the software.

To explore more of what’s new in Vectorworks, click here.