Color Forecast web tool provides real time color trends abroad
Making sure I’m super ‘on trend’ on holiday isn’t really that important to me. Yes, I like to make sure that my clothes are clean, and ideally that they possess enough style to make people whisper ‘who’s that girl’ ( though in all likelihood it’ will be ‘did she realize that her skirt is tucked in her..‘) but trying to identify local trends before I go is generally a non issue to me.
Whilst I might not be that bothered I have a fair amount of fashionista friends who would die if they thought they were wearing the wrong outfits.. or the wrong shades. Dontcha know that Pantone orange was so last year? (not kidding; it actually was. Though they called it Honeysuckle, and this year it’s Tangerine.)
Color Forecast is a way for the trend hungry to stay up to date, and it’s actually pretty clever. High speed cameras are placed in three European hotspots, and they feed data 24/7 to the ‘ColorTrack’ System‘ which identifies shades that are most common for the particular areas. This can then be broken down into images of the actual colours being worn or featured around the target city, and it’s pretty cool seeing the variety of colors that are populating the globe.
I love the real time trending aspect of it and it’s pretty sweet to pick the city and then spot flashes of blue in the wild- the camera picks up the smallest details, so it’s not just fashion, you also get blue bicycles, flower displays etc, and it builds a bigger picture of the city and the overall style of its inhabitants.
It’s a social colour analysis and I like the fact that people choose different colours worldwide- would be great to dig a little deeper and discover why!
Naturally, this service isn’t designed just to assuage the fashion hunger of the world, as Color Forecast was designed to work with Pimkie (an online fashion brand) so once you’ve identified trending colors you’re now one click away from buying them (they are suggested to you after you’ve been browsing).
I like the insights you get from playing with this tool, and creating a Big Brother network of colour seems a lot less invasive than other forms of data collection I’ve seen. I’d like to see this project extended to more cities (Moscow, London and Amsterdam come to mind) and I think it would be great to see the Color Forecast project grow and grow, as it has so much potential, and so many interesting insights to offer up.
