Colour News January 2025
Colour related news and events
Welcome to another edition of ICA-Belgium Colour News, with greetings from a snowy Belgium.
New Year Wishes
by Jeannette Hanenburg, ICA-Belgium President
Looking in reflection to 2024, one can say that the world keeps on being full off insecurity, with wars, climate change and political disruptions around us. After the pandemic we hoped to get our everyday living back, but unfortunately it became worse, in which many power struggles are fought over and for many people around the world, every day life has become an Utopia.
Life became faster since AI came into our lives. AI made numerous things easier, but it is also giving concern about something of which we can not oversee where it will end up in the future.
Fortunately, there is one thing we can always focus on: our work with colour. Let it serve as a constant reminder of positivity and share your findings to make the world a little brighter and more vibrant each day.
At ICA-Belgium, sharing the beauty and fascinating applications of Colour remains a central focus, now and in the year ahead. We continue to provide a platform that bridges science, art, design, and industry in the realm of colour. You can now find the website of ICA-Belgium on the Substack platform, and we hope you will join us there to stay connected and inspired.
Colour Talks
By organising the Sunday Colour talks in 2024, we continue sharing the knowledge of experts with you, to learn, and most of all to enjoy. Therefore, a big thank you to the speakers for sharing their expertise with us in the 2024:
Sonia van de Haar – Place-Based Colour Design for Architecture
Ulrike Koch-Brinkman – Pigments on Marble
Stephen Westland – Colour Nowcasting
Catherine Borowski & Lee Baker – How to Hack your Happiness Levels in 20 Minutes
The recordings of their presentations can be found on our YouTube Channel and on our website.
Events
ICA also organised 3 live events:
Walk & Talk / Meet & Learn event for ICA-Belgium members, at the villa Empain in Brussels, visiting the exhibition about the work of Josef and Anni Albers.
A 1-day workshop Colour Stories – Mapping the Living Past at the Gallo-Roman Museum in Tongeren, Belgium, led by Maja Kaurin, Inez Michiels and Jeannette Hanenburg.
A workshop Colour Forecast Research 2026. Although the workshop had to be rescheduled for next year, you can find interesting videos on the ICA website about the process of making a trend forecasting book by Anna Maria Nyk.
Thank you for your support
A heartfelt thank you to our members for your unwavering support of ICA-Belgium. Your dedication and contributions have been essential in helping us (financially) sustain our mission. As a fully volunteer-run organisation, your donations enable us to continue exploring and sharing the fascinating world of Colour. We hope you will renew your membership for 2025 and beyond.
For those who are not yet members, we warmly invite you to support us for carrying together the working cost of ICA-Belgium. Even little amounts help to support and there is already a donation possible for just five euros through the website.
In addition to the Colour Talks planned for 2025, we have some exciting workshops in the pipeline, which we’ll share details about soon. For now, we wish you new ideas, fresh opportunities, renewed hope, inspiring journeys, and, above all, good health in 2025.
Warm greetings from Jeannette, Inez and Maja
Our move to Substack
We have moved our website ica-belgium.org to Substack and are in the process of also migrating our Newsletters from MailChimp to Substack, an online publishing platform.
Cost is only one of the reasons we are moving our Newsletter from MailChimp to Substack (it is free and quick to publish posts and create newsletters on Substack). Another big reason is that doing so we hope to be able to provide you with a better newsletter, publicly accessible archive of all the news and a better way to connect with each other. We hope to build a community and give all of you an easier way to share your colour related news with us and each other.
If you are getting our newsletters through MailChimp, you don’t need to do anything. Once the move is complete, you will receive an automatic email from icabelgium@substack.com, informing you about being added to ICA-Belgium Colour News as a free subscriber. You will be able to, as before, unsubscribe at any time.
You will start receiving updates right in your inbox. You will also be able to read a full archive of posts on our Substack along with other news and posts as they are published. As until now, our emails will land in your inbox once or twice per month.
You will now be able to leave your comments on the Newsletter and take the discussion further.
If you wish, you will also be able to read our newsletter on the Substack App.
Thank you for supporting us and being part of ICA-Belgium community!
ICA-Belgium Membership
Membership renewals
It is time to renew your membership!
We have simplified the process and membership payments will now be processed through Substack, too. Furthemore, the membership will now be valid for a full year, and not a calendar year, as before.
To renew your membership, go to the subscription page and choose a yearly subscription.
Do you work with colour? Would you like to become an ICA-Belgium member? You can apply for membership here.
Other ways to join and support ICA-Belgium
You don’t wish to officially become an ICA-Belgium member but would like to be part of a community of people who share the interest in colour and get to know other colour professionals and colour lovers, get news about interdisciplinary colour research, and colour related developments and events?
In that case, you can opt to support us by becoming a paid subscriber of our Colour News for a small fee of € 5 per month or € 45 per year. Or you can also become a sponsor. See the options here.
Benefits for paid subscribers
Members only Chat Group
All paid subscribers (monthly and yearly), sponsors and active ICA-Belgium members (with a running yearly membership in order) get to be a part of a members only Chat Group, on our Substack, where you can get to know other colour professionals, share about your work, develop opportunities for collaboration and contribute to a dynamic colour platform.
Yearly paid subscribers, sponsors and active ICA-Belgium members are entitled to additional benefits:
Discounts for our events and workshops
Your colour related news published in our newsletter and website
Opportunity to be featured in an article / interview about your colour related work in our newsletter and website
If you need an invoice for your monthly or yearly subscription/membership, please follow these steps.
We thank you for your support and look forward to building a community of colour lovers with you!
* active ICA-Belgium members (with a running yearly membership in order) will automatically be added as the paid subscribers of our Colour News.
Call for ICA-Belgium members' activity reports
The submission deadline is 24 January 2025.
Every year the AIC (Association International de la Couleur) publishes an Annual Review of activities by its international members. We like to celebrate the achievements of our members, however small or large and include them in our report. We would like to hear about your colour-related work in 2024 as well as your plans for this year. These may be events, publications, research, projects, or completed work... The reports will be published in the AIC Annual Review as well as in the ICA-Belgium Annual Activity Report on our website and shared through our social media.
Please send your reports to ica@ica-belgium.org (with the message title Report 2024_Your Name). The maximum word count is 200, the text should be in English, and a few quality photos can also be attached (300 dpi, with a short caption description; please send as individual files, not embedded in a document).
Save the Date
9 February 2025
Online: Sunday morning Colour Talk with Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic - The Future of Colour: Fostering Sustainability in Colour Design
Our November Colour Talk with Ingrid Calvo Ivanovic unfortunately had to be rescheduled and it will now take place on the 9th of February. Registration is coming soon.
23 March 2025
Online: Sunday morning Colour Talk: INTERNATIONAL COLOUR DAY
More information and registration is coming soon.
As a nonprofit organisation, run entirely by volunteers and on a very limited budget, we are counting on you to help us continue offering free online Colour Talks, colour related information and accessible colour related events and education. Consider to either become an ICA-Belgium member, or a paid newsletter subscriber. You can also buy ICA a coffee.
