What does it mean to be human? What sets us apart from everything else? It is a question becoming increasingly difficult to answer as AI grows more sophisticated, replicating many qualities we once believed made us unique. To understand our distinctiveness, we must look at what the digital world still lacks: emotion, empathy, an instinctive sense of play, and the desire to leave a trace of ourselves for future generations.
As the boundaries between the digital and physical continue to blur, the need for authenticity will grow. By 2028, we will celebrate the fallible, the imperfect and the hand-hewn. Design will focus on how things feel, not simply how they look. Being human becomes a creative counterbalance—a return to empathy, tactility and imperfection. Technology will be reinterpreted through human values, transforming design into a more emotional and meaningful tool. This is not about rejecting technology but viewing it through a human lens.
Human beings are inherently complex. We are both good and bad, strong and weak, loving and hateful, peaceful and warlike. Our colour palettes reflect this spectrum of emotions, balancing fragility with strength, humour with gravitas, and vulnerability with resilience. At the same time, we must acknowledge the growing influence of technology, artificial intelligence and robotics, and the role they play in how we live and design.
Here, contradiction is not stress but energy where ethereal shades meet saturated force, and nothing stays singular. In this dialogue, colour becomes alive: unpredictable, layered, and deeply human.
IMAGE: ESTUDIO GLORIA JOVER
This is a palette that rises up from the warmth of the earth into the cool of the air.. It is a barely-there family of colour, perfect for communicating weightlessness in an elegant, effortless way.One of the most fundamental conditions of human existence is that life is finite. Here, the boundaries of what it means to be human are expressed through tones that no longer hold pigment as a fixed identity but move toward dissolution.
IMAGE: STUDIO ANNE IRENE/MIDJOURNEY
Colour becomes the trace of the process, the testimony of perpetual change.
To design with colour is to design with time. Each tone is a potion containing the mystery of creation, the instant when matter chooses to become beauty.Colour is not seen, it is felt. Mid-tones balanced and deeply comforting envelop the body and gently quiet the mind. Open, generous, tactile they invite contact and closeness.
IMAGE: BAUTEK PATEL/UNSPLASH
The crepuscular onset of dusk, then nightfall inspires these four dark shades. A moonless near black, an inky navy, a nightfall forest green and a shimmering deep turquoise help refine our sense of the magical power of darkness.Four colours rooted in childhood form the foundation of this palette. It’s all about having fun, reconnecting us with what makes us laugh, and understanding how important the role of play is in human development.
IMAGE: NAIL GILFANOV/UNSPLASH
As day and night find their balance, a quiet alchemy takes place. The palette of Equinox emerges, blending stillness with slow enchantment, deftly moving between light and shadow, standing on the threshold between seasons.Human presence is embodied through relationship and sensation, where experience becomes tactile through touch, and response. Colours carry this warmth and tactility in a palette of comforting, generous shades.
IMAGE: STUDIO ANNE IRENE/MIDJOURNEY
Here, pulse and rhythm find their flow resulting in a charged vitality. Key shades blend stamina with pure momentum. Moving instinctively between control and release, each shade is tuned to the energy of the body in motion.
IMAGE: MIDJOURNEY
The notion that colours set the tone, the mood, the motivation for how we feel, how we interact and engage with the world seems more relevant now than ever. Being human and being conscious and responsible about the environment is a driver.
IMAGE: FUJI AQUARIUM
These colours are not just a lesson in history, but also in staying power. They teach us how some colours are destined to be forgotten and some remain with us, years later, reinventing themselves to fit with modern sensibilities.
IMAGE: MAKSIM LOGINOV/UNSPLASH
