by Wesleigh Mowry

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Back in December, PANTONE announced its Color of the Year for 2024: Peach Fuzz, a cozy, gentle and elegant color meant to invoke connection and compassion. They partnered with brands to bring everything from toothbrushes to Motorola phones to consumers in the warm, velvety color. Despite being a leading authority on color trends, what PANTONE couldn’t have predicted was that the color that would actually take over 2024 would be the complete opposite. 

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In early June pop star Charli XCX dropped her newest album Brat with a jarring and immediately iconic cover design featuring an abrasive lime green and a simple, slightly blurry sans serif font. In a conversation with Billboard, the singer describes the color as “actually quite disgusting” and deliberately “really unfriendly and uncool.” Being uncool didn’t last long, though, as the color was suddenly everywhere, a universal shorthand for all things trendy. 

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How did we get from soft Peach Fuzz to lurid Brat Green? Here’s some design trends we’re watching to help explain. 

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Anti-Design Movement

If you’ve noticed a lot more designs looking messy, loud or overcrowded and generally kind of awful, that’s actually on purpose. The anti-design movement is all about ignoring design conventions and encouraging experimentation. “Anti-design feels and looks like rebellion,” Imogen-Mary Hoefkens, a senior art director at 99designs, told Built In. It’s not simply breaking the rules, she added: “It’s pretty much setting them on fire.” Brat’s intentionally blurred font and intense unappealing color leans into this aesthetic. 

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Y2K Aesthetic Resurgence 

Trends from the 2000s are back, to the chagrin of Millennials everywhere who cannot believe they’re old enough to see their teen favorites cycle back into style (just me?). Lime green was a staple of the Y2K aesthetic that looked forward to a bright, modern, tech-filled future. The designer behind the Brat album cover explained in an interview with the New York Times that he took inspiration from creating graphics for early social media sites like MySpace as a teen in the early aughts. 

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AI Pushback

AI-generated artwork is showing up everywhere, and as the glossy, often hyper-realistic imagery becomes more ubiquitous, designs that stand out from the crowd will be those obviously made by human hand. Much like how the 1960s hippie movement leaned into psychedelic illustrations in response to the clean lines of mid-century modern, and 90s grunge and zine culture emerged after the corporate and economic boom of the 80s, I predict the pendulum will swing back to more DIY designs—like a generic font on a single-color background that’s been replicated by fans and presidential campaigns alike a million times over.  

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What will the next trending color be? Will culture forego Brat Green in favor of something demure and coquette like Peach Fuzz, or continue down the unfriendly path with a new and uncomfortably shocking color? We’ll be tracking the design trends to find out. 

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