Benjamin Moore's 2026 Color of the Year drops Friday as design brands lean into warm palettes

Benjamin Moore teases October 16 reveal with a retrospective cut

The most consequential beat for the week is a paint announcement that hasn't yet shipped. A Ricciardi Brothers Facebook video frames the upcoming pick as a "then and now" comparison of every Color of the Year to date, asking viewers to weigh in on favourites ahead of the scheduled October 16 unveiling. Because the paint brand effectively pre-loads a built-in narrative and a public voting moment, even practitioners waiting for the announcement have an unusual amount of lead time to prepare mood boards, mock-ups and client decks before the colour goes live.

Wellness-led palette refresh lands on contract furniture

Keilhauer has rolled out a refreshed palette of 15 hues for its plastic products, organised around wellness and wellbeing, connected experiences, inviting environments, and deliberate colour stories. For designers specifying contract seating and ancillary furniture, the move compresses palette work into a single brand-curated system rather than asking studios to assemble their own colour stories from scratch.

Painterly colour comes to handmade rugs and outdoor textiles

A collaboration between designer Liora Manné and Surya extends her approach to colour, texture and material exploration across more than 50 handmade rugs and pillows, with outdoor-safe rug designs included in the line. The expansion gives interior designers a palette range that now reaches exterior and high-traffic settings without abandoning the painterly direction she is known for.

Mercedes-Benz rebuilds vintage paint chips with modern tooling

Belinda Günther, head of Color and Trim for Mercedes-Benz, has detailed how the company's Manufaktur programme recreates classic vehicle hues using contemporary paint technology. For brands restoring or restyling older vehicles — and for designers who treat automotive colour as a reference library — the story is less about a single hue than about a documented pipeline for turning a worn, period-correct reference into a reproducible modern finish.

Cellulose gel writes multicolour images with light

A team at Northeastern University led by MIE Associate Professor Hongli Zhu has shown a method for writing multicolor images into cellulose-based photonic gels using light. The implication for colour work is material rather than digital: surfaces that can be re-tinted optically rather than repainted, opening up a design problem that sits between signage, packaging and interior finishes. Practitioners thinking ahead about programmable colour should treat this as an early signal of where display-adjacent research is heading.

What to watch next

The single concrete deadline on the calendar is the October 16 Color of the Year reveal — designers who want first-mover advantage on mood boards and brand-deck refreshes should block that morning. Beyond that, the question worth tracking is how the Keilhauer 15-hue system and Manné's outdoor-safe rugs perform in real projects, and whether the cellulose photonic-gel research moves from lab demonstration toward a printable commercial surface. Practitioners can keep their own pipelines consistent by leaning on utilities like the Color Contrast Checker, the RGB to CMYK Converter and the CMYK Color Chart for Printing: Start From CSS Names when translating any of this week's named palettes from screen to substrate.

For projects that need accessibility held across both digital and print, RGB to CMYK for Accessibility: Keep Contrast in Print and Color Contrast Checker for Web Design: Design System Tips lay out the guardrails.