Event Recap: Colour Lives Here with GF Smith

Our recent Colour Lives Here event offered an engaging insight into how Hull-based paper mill GF Smith is rethinking colour; not just as a material choice, but as a cultural, social, and political language.

A key theme of the talk was how colour naming carries meaning and responsibility. GF Smith explained how several long-standing colour names were revisited and updated to better reflect contemporary social norms and political sensitivities.

For a brand with a global reach, colour language must be inclusive, relevant, and culturally aware, demonstrating that even something as seemingly simple as a shade name can shape how colour is understood worldwide.

The presentation also explored GF Smith’s redesign of their iconic colour swatches. Moving away from a traditional booklet format, the new carabiner-based system is intentionally portable and tactile. It encourages creatives to tear off samples, combine colours freely, and explore unexpected pairings—reinforcing the idea that colour experimentation should be active, intuitive, and hands-on.

One of the most compelling moments of the event centred on a deceptively simple question: what is your favourite colour? While children are often asked this, adults rarely are. This observation led to GF Smith’s ambitious campaign to identify the world’s favourite colour. The resulting survey—the largest of its kind—gathered over 26,000 responses. The outcome was Marrs Green, a bold, vibrant teal that captures both optimism and intensity.

This campaign also opened the door to cross-category brand collaborations, showing how colour can move fluidly between disciplines, industries, and communities.

Overall, Colour Lives Here was a thoughtful reminder that colour is never neutral. It reflects who we are, how we feel, and how we imagine the future – and GF Smith continues to position itself at the centre of that conversation.