VIEWPOINT COLOR 18 - LEGACY!
This issue of Viewpoint Color Magazine is about Legacy. As we face environmental, social, and technological shifts, the idea of ‘Legacy’ reminds us that creativity holds power: to connect and to envision worlds that honor what came before while daring to
redefine what’s next. In exploring ‘Legacy’, this issue also considers how memory, culture, and innovation intertwine. Legacy is not static, it evolves. through reinterpretation and renewal. Designers, artists, and thinkers today are challenged to build responsibly, crafting work that resonates ethically and emotionally with future generations. The colors we choose can embody values like resilience, optimism, and care, shaping how stories are remembered and retold.
Published twice/year: June/December
Origin: The Netherlands
CONTENTS VPC#18 LEGACY
PANTONE COLOUR OF THE YEAR 2026
“An airy white hue, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer opens up space for creativity, allowing our imagination to wander and drift so that new insights and bold ideas can emerge and take shape… A lofty white whose aerated presence acts as a whisper of calm and peace in a noisy world…” Laurie Pressman, Vice-President, Pantone Color Institute.
CITY COLORS
Our global round-up where we look at what’s happening in cities around the world: the patchwork of gold that is Manila; all the blues from dawn to dusk of Ibiza; and lastly a magnetic blue in a love letter to Queens, NY.
PERSONAL IDENTITY
The first of our six color stories where we explore how ‘Legacy’ begins within the self and how personal identity, our own values, choices, and achievements, form the foundation of the heritage we leave behind. In the same way, our palette starts with white, which is our key color, an empty canvas ready to be filled with color.
Image: Alexander Schmidt/PUNCTUM
WEAVING IDENTITITES
In Bodil Ouédraogo’s hands, fabric becomes more than surface. It transforms into an archive of identity, a medium through which personal history, cultural inheritance, and diasporic longing meet.
Image: Bodil Ouédraogo’s collection.
KINSHIP
Kinship and ancestry form the most immediate circle through which legacy is transmitted. It encompasses not only family ties but also extended relations, networks of care, and chosen bonds that carry values, resources, and social identity across generations. We accompany this with a palette of generational colors that reflect the strength and depth of bloodlines and the richness that ancestry and inheritance bring. Blues are key to this approach.
Image courtesy of Qingjun Huang
FROM LINEAGE TO LEGACY
Raelis Vasquez’s realistic paintings bring these ideas of heritage and memory to life. Drawing inspiration from personal digital photographs, he transforms everyday moments into powerful works of art.
Image: Matrimonio 2 by Raelis Vasquez
HERITAGE & TRADITIONS
This chapter considers how culture is adapted and sometimes reinvented as part of our shared legacy. These traditions act as frameworks for memory and heritage existing in rituals, ceremonies, stories, and everyday practices. Our palette is a chromatic story of mid-tones that speak of ancient places and archaic rites but with a spiritual and material relevance to today.
Image:Tahmineh Monzavi, Soroush Majidi, Payman Barkhordari
THE SKIN OF MEMORY
Tangible legacy speaks of the memory held within matter; surfaces that have absorbed human gestures, environmental rhythms, and traces of life. These man- made artifacts, intertwined with natural elements, become living archives.
Image: Loris Cecchini
EACH ONE TEACH ONE
Patta and the Power of Community
To create legacy, you must build community. It’s the foundations, networks, and support systems that hold you up, now and in the future. Few embody that idea more clearly than Patta.
Image: Kyle Weeks
THE LANGUAGE OF LEGACY
Across the palette of Spring/Summer 2027, color becomes more than aesthetic; it becomes language. Each color’s message speaks of renewal, restraint, and reconnection, revealing a collective desire to find meaning amid the noise of modern life. What emerges is not a chase for novelty but a search for essence. These colors move beyond surface beauty to capture the emotional undercurrents shaping culture, the need to pause, to simplify, to rediscover tactility and truth.
