New trend: the Klein Blue

In December of last year, I published a post in Italian about the electric blue color, explaining how I expected it to become a very trendy color in 2020. And it turns out I was right.

In particular, the KLEIN BLUE (also called IKB-International Klein Blue) is very trendy right now both in design and in interior.

As the name of the color suggests, this shade was studied and developed by the French artist Yves Klein as part of his research as an artist. In fact, the monochromatic paintings made by Klein starting from 1957 as well as some of his performances are very famous.

“Essential, potential, spatial, immeasurable, vital, static, dynamic, absolute, pneumatic, pure, prestigious, wonderful, maddening, unstable, exact, sensitive, immaterial”, so the artist described his blue.

IKB is characterized by a massive presence of ultramarine blue and was developed by Klein with the help of chemists to create a color that had the same brightness and intensity of dry color pigments: the solution was to suspend the dry pigment in a synthetic resin. This new shade was patented by Klein but was produced only by the Adam paint factory in Montparnasse in Paris.

Only in 2018, on the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the artist’s birth, the Yves Klein Archives decide to create together with the French decorative paint company Ressource, an ultramarine blue paint based on the color invented by Yves Klein.

Of course it is possible, however, to get a color very similar to the IKB also using other color codes.

Here are some color codes:

PANTONE 18-3949 (è quello che più si avvicina)

NCS NCS 1981-R73B

HEX #002FQA7

RGB (r; g; b) (0; 47; 167)

CMYK (c; m; y; k) (98; 84; 0; 0)

Below are some of my latest “discoveries” which are characterized by this color.

I had already summarized these findings in a series of stories on my Instagram profile. A new column that I would like to launch on Instagram where to collect all my research on trends! So if you are interested in always being updated on new trends in the world of design and interiors, follow me on Instagram.

Turbo Milano – Architect Davide Gernone