Introducing the Pantone Color of the Year 2025: ‘Mocha Mousse’

The Pantone 2025 Color of the Year is Mocha Mousse! Pantone’s color of the year sets the tone for color inspiration, trending colors, and design influences for the next 365 days (and sometimes even more). Every year since 1999, The Pantone Color Institute has picked a new color to showcase emerging trends and draw attention to the importance of color in design and culture. 

Let’s examine the Pantone Color of the Year and revisit some design inspiration from recent years.

Welcome Mocha Mousse as Pantone’s 2025 Color of the Year! Joining the exclusive, carefully curated group of colors, the color Mocha Mousse is a harmonious, rich brown that sets the tone of sharing simple pleasures, comfort, and indulgence. 

Grounding and neutral, color Mocha Mousse has plenty of potential for versatile design uses playing off the earthy tone and simple sophistication. 

This rich brown hue evokes the comforting and luxurious feelings associated with chocolate and coffee. This sophisticated, earthy, and comforting color reflects a desire for everyday pleasures and a connection to natural tones.

Already influential, Pantone’s collaborations include their traditional partners: Motorola, Joybird, Spoonflower, and others. Motorola touts a “timeless vegan leather finish” that plays into the earthly feeling. A perfect neutral, the color Mocha Mousse makes sense in interior design palettes and brings a warm base color to Joybird’s collaboration.

A color-centric group of Pantone experts gets together yearly to determine the new color, pulling from various artistic influences, including pop-culture inspiration, noteworthy films, scientific discoveries, and anything and everything that could factor into the ever-changing zeitgeist of trending color culture.

Designers and artists across many disciplines regularly use Pantone colors in their projects. These color combinations, font picks, and key elements can skyrocket your projects, and they are one of the core building blocks of innovative branding, trend-setting marketing campaigns, and culture-changing projects.

2024’s Peach Fuzz color of the year was a soft hue that opened up the desire to nurture and enrich ourselves, others, and our relationships. A kind color that reminded us of vintage nostalgia, warm tones, and modern elegance, peach fuzz was designed to bring us together.

In Pantone collaborations, togetherness and connections were apparent in Spoonflower’s comforting designs, Ruggable’s calming home décor, and Motorola’s sensual technology and color connection combination. In each, steady relationship building was placed at the forefront through color, product, and day-to-day product use.

In the year of Viva Magenta, a new vivacity took root in the overarching color scheme of 2023. Viva Magenta overflowed with spirit, stamina, and strength in Pantone’s “Magentaverse.” A transformational color, magenta, sits between blue and red, creating a harmony between the two colors.

Drawing from nature and reality, Pantone aimed to remind us of the vivid authenticity of reality in a world ever more reliant on technology.

As part of Pantone and Motorola’s ongoing color and technology collaboration, Motorola released the Motorola Edge 30 Fusion in Pantone’s magenta as part of the #Magentaverse. This space connects Viva Magenta in art, design, science, and technology.

Artechouse became the home of the #Magentaverse, an immersive, multisensory exhibition that explored the color of magenta through captivating digital projections and interactive displays. The eco-conscious skater shoe brand Cariuma launched six shoe styles in Viva Magenta. When used for personal identity or design strategies, this color strongly expresses power and enthusiasm. 

A blend of serene blue and emotional red, Veri Peri shared society’s desire to continue moving towards creativity and innovation. In color psychology, the purple spectrum creates a harmonious union of the reliability of blue and the vibrancy of red, lending itself to dynamic, creative, and joyful projects.

As a bright yet grounding color, periwinkle acts as a playful base for brilliant color palettes that can be used in product development, fashion, and other industries. 

A long-time Pantone collaborator, Brazilian ethics-driven sneaker brand CARIUMA launched a limited-edition, sustainable line of Veri Peri shoes. Pantone’s and CARIUMA’s inventive spirits were clear in their team-up.

Pantone also solidified its future-centric aim by collaborating with other people-forward, eco-conscious brands, including Copenhagen Design, Priority Bicycles, and Kafrit Group.

Uplifting and hopeful, this color combination of Ultimate Gray & Illuminating Yellow was perfect for reflecting on 2020 and an optimistic look toward the future. Soft gray emanated feelings of solidity and steady connection, while sunshine yellow projected hope and energetic confidence.

Commonly used in interior design, this color combination spoke to the enduring human spirit seen in the countless ways people found to connect in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In keeping with interior design, the Copenhagen Design and Pantone Living collaboration offered dual-hued classic mugs and keychains that people could incorporate into their daily lives.

Ever cutting-edge, Pantone also collaborated with TIPTOE, a sustainable furniture design studio, to produce yellow and grey table legs meant to create unique furniture pieces.

As the new decade began, Pantone determined the year’s new color to be a stately, calming blue called Classic Blue. Harking back to the first-ever color of the year, Cerulean, 2020’s blue color was a natural progression towards a more mature blue for our growing society.

Hoping for a year of peace, stability, and dependability ahead, the classic blue projected connection and relatability. In a way, a return to the classic prepared us for the unexpected community distancing of 2020.

Pantone chose to pair with companies like Adobe Stock, Artechouse, FedEx, and TeaLeaves, focusing on collaborators who shared a calming sensibility and steadfast staying power. TeaLeaves’ blue botanical tea blended a berry medley and sharp citrus to match the classic blue.

Classic blue has been widely used in corporate design materials for its trustworthy feeling, so a collaboration with FedEx touting dependable color printing made sense. Using this classic blue can bring a royal, sophisticated, and reliable feel to your projects.

Pantone’s color Mocha Mousse is an essential marker for the coming year’s trending colors. You can create outstanding work by incorporating Pantone’s Color of the Year and Envato assets into your palettes and projects.

If you’re looking for more Pantone color magic, read Pantone Color of the Year 2019: Living Coral and How to Create Pantone Colors in Your Designs.