Leslie Harrington and Anat Lechner receive the 2024 Macbeth Award

At our 2024 Virtual Annual Meeting on October 19, the Macbeth Award was bestowed upon Leslie Harrington and Anat Lechner for their pioneering work developing the online color resource HueData. The citation, quoted below in its entirety, was delivered by Paula Alessi. Upon receiving the Macbeth Award recipients are invited to present a short lecture about their work. That recording is available here.

Citation by Paula Alessi

The Inter-Society Color Council Macbeth Award is given for one or more recent outstanding contributions in the field of color. I am proud to announce that the recipients of the 2024 ISCC Macbeth Award are Dr. Leslie Harrington and Professor Anat Lechner, Co-Founders of Huedata Inc., a color intelligence company. These remarkable visionaries are revolutionizing the way color decisions are being made using advance analytics and artificial intelligence.

First let’s learn a bit about their background.

Dr. Leslie Harrington has a PhD, an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business and a BA in Interior Design. She has held various senior management positions and has consulted in industries such as cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, durable goods, consumer goods, and technology industries in the areas of color strategy and color marketing. She serves as Executive Director of The Color Association of the United States specializing in studying color trends. She is a professional member of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID). Dr. Harrington was on the Executive Committee of the ISCC Board of Directors, the Color Marketing Group, and is the Immediate Past President of AIC.

Anat Lechner obtained her PhD and MBA degrees from Rutgers University School of Management. She also has an MBA degree from Tel Aviv University Recanati School of Business and a BSc. from Tel Aviv University. She is a Full Professor of Business at the Stern School of Business, New York University, where she focuses on industry disruption, innovation and strategic change. A former researcher at McKinsey & Co., Professor Lechner has advised global Fortune 100 firms in the financial services, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food, technology design and retail industries. She has numerous appearances in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, British Broadcasting Corporation, and other premier global outlets.

Now let’s focus on the prescient work that Professor Lechner and Dr. Harrington have done for over a decade that is being recognized as deserving of the ISCC Macbeth Award.

 Together, Lechner and Harrington formed a color intelligence company known as Huedata, Inc. This revolutionary company is the first color intelligence platform that offers color data analytics and insights to inspire creativity, inform strategic decisions, and validate design choices of products, brands and environments globally.  

They have accomplished this by digitizing color across multiple commercial and non-commercial applications. The data are then structured using proprietary algorithms and visualized to best inform, inspire and validate color decisions.

The ISCC Macbeth Award recognizes the pioneering effort of Huedata, the breadth, scope, and robustness of the platform, and its overall foundational impact on the field of color. The sheer amount of accumulated color data analytics (i.e. currently more than 35 million color data points) serve as evidence of the comprehensive nature of the platform and the unique strategic value that it provides. As an example, Huedata holds over one million color data points representing more than 30 years of color use in fashion worldwide, across cities, designers, categories and seasons. Another example is the 100,000 art collection color analytics from 12,000 painters spanning 8 centuries of art. These are just two examples of the data in the Huedata massive proprietary color database.

Finally, their technology focuses on the value that Huedata brings to designers, strategists, researchers and educators who can use this treasure trove of color data to make informed design decisions for a variety of use cases.

Here is a list of 10 key benefits associated with using the Huedata platform:

1.                   Identify emerging color trends.
2.                   Conduct competitive analysis of industry color usage.
3.                   Brand or rebrand a company or product.
4.                   Name colors for new product introductions.
5.                   Track color popularity on social media for micro-trends.

• 6.                      Understand color associations across cultures for product design and   marketing.

1.                   Follow prominent designers and artists for color inspiration.
2.                   Forecast color trends for industry use.
3.                   Research historical colors and cultural context for application.
4.                   Validate and rationalize color design decisions.

Note that Huedata also collaborates with academic institutions, research organizations, and scholars to advance the field of color intelligence and its application across various industries. 

Researchers can leverage Huedata’s vast color database to support their studies in fields ranging from product design and marketing to sociology and visual arts.

Now that I have shared some of the background of this iconic work, it is time for you to hear a more detailed description from its ingenious inventors. I turn the floor over to Dr. Leslie Harrington and Professor Anat Lechner, our 2024 ISCC Macbeth Award recipients.