Welcome to the Future: Revealing Dunn-Edwards 2023 Color + Design Trends

We are approaching a time of peak post-modernism where fear, strength, compassion, distrust, and community inspire us to surround ourselves with elements from the past, present, and future as we attempt to find our bearings and create safe and multi-purposeful spaces. These cocoons of escape transport us to worlds where everything is blended and time is irrelevant.

Each year, Dunn-Edwards explores emerging palettes and design styles that reflect the outcome of our changing reality. Pulling inspiration from fashion, technology, art, and popular movements, we identify the key themes that are driving aesthetics forward. This is our time capsule for 2023.

LIVE IN JOY

We are rebuilding stronger, and our spaces come alive with color and playful displays of optimism.

The ups and downs of the past few years have resulted in a determined resilience that now manifests itself as an outburst of pent-up energy. Athletic-inspired brights play with energizing, retro-futuristic decor, pairing elements from the ’60s and ’80s with bold geometrics and innovative fabrics. With influences from ski chalets to digital worlds, this trend pulls from the fun bucket of past and future.

Graphic brights pop against fresh pastels creating a resolutely joyful feel. This modern palette will make you want to get up and dance!

LIBERATED NOMAD

Our spaces reflect our celebration of diversity—with influences from nearly every place and time.

As we seek to reexamine and reinvent the past, design influences travel across worlds and decades. This complex aesthetic combines arts, folklore, Baroque, and industrial elements to realign fragments of style in provocative ways. The result is a jubilant, sometimes macabre disturbance of codes and values, where each corner of a space tells its own story.

Rich and luxuriant colors beg for chiaroscuro. This daring palette expertly mixes masculine classics and subtle halftones with sophisticated brights.

WELL INTENTIONS

We live in a new duality: the desire to heal the earth and, at the same time, to escape from the constraints of the terrestrial.

In pursuit of greater well-being and coexistence with nature, we turn to innovative products and materials that promise to make life more peaceful and uncluttered. Through design, we explore the stranger aspects of the planet with shapes, colors, and textures inspired by botanics and underwater worlds. Natural design is no longer synonymous with primitive—it has been transported into the future.

Create a balance of nature-inspired mystery and gentle lights. Vegetal and mineral colors ground and soothe when paired with the openness of clean neutrals.

LIFE IN POETRY

Uncertainty and rapid change have reignited a nostalgic craving for simpler, more romantic times.

Greater work flexibility and the need to escape have driven us to seek out and create workcation spaces that feel like summer cottages and obsolete seaside retreats. Handicrafts, an abundance of florals, and imperfect objects give spaces a casual, timeless feel as we celebrate creativity and embrace the charm of a more carefree lifestyle.

This summery palette bursts with freshness. Soft, sun-bleached pastels and bright watercolors relax alongside seaside nauticals and warm browns.

2023: What It All Means

We are rebounding from difficult times with a flood of creative expressions that provide escape, connection, comfort, and survival—all at once. Periods and stories are mingling, hybridizing, and inspiring us to design new spaces that pull from the best of everything ever.

Warm chromatics dominate, echoing our optimism and the influence of space exploration. High-impact and nostalgic colors make a joyful comeback, earthy and vegetal shades delve into the mysteries of nature, and delicate neutrals give us space to imagine and reflect.

Welcome to the future!