Posted: Tuesday, July 27, 2010 2:16 pm

A brace of new ideas from BASF brings innovative visual effects to walls, furniture and flooring, opening up worlds of possibility for the look, feel and usage of surfaces.

There’s very little that’s new in the world of design, just rearrangements of things that have come before. It’s rare that completely new materials with completely new properties – which enable completely new design concepts – are released.

BASF’s three recently launched effect pigments do just that: they are raw material ingredients for painted, or coated surfaces which extend the scope of what’s possible in colour and visual effects, creating the possibility for exciting, never-before-seen interior and exterior design. Floors, meanwhile, are being equally revolutionized by the new generations of decorative flooring generated by BASF technology.

The newly launched Lumina® Royal Blue pigment creates the most intensely brilliant blue you can find. The first of a new generation of most-advanced-technology blues, it offers the highest intensity (“chroma”), brightness, lustre and colour purity of any blue pigment currently available for paints and coatings, opening up a world of new silken and luminous surfaces. Its coolly mysterious and confidently majestic blue allows experienced stylists to create extreme-luxury colours in high chroma shades, maximizing the visual impact of buildings, consumer electronics goods and kitchen appliances.

Similarly, Paliocrom® Brilliant Orange L 2850 provides designers with an incredibly vibrant orange with exceptionally high purity of colour, strength and intensity – it is, after all, “brilliant”! – creating delicious jewel tones burning with secret, lustrous sparkle. It also shows a very pronounced “flop” (a sudden transition in colour, when viewed from different angles), lending even more intrigue, depth and emphasis to three-dimensional surfaces. This effect pigment’s high “chroma” and gloss enable access to a whole new world of gold, orange and red metallic styling options on architecture, sporting goods and coatings for computers, communications devices and consumer goods.

Pristine, minimalist, futuristic white represents serenity and security. And yet, a “pure” white surface is hard to achieve in the creation of objects and structures. The search for a whiter shade of white gets even more complicated for pearlescent effects, as traditional pearl effect pigments typically show a yellowish tint, which appears “dirty”. Glacier™ Frost White, our third new effect pigment, solves all of this and creates a pearlescent white effect with a cool, bluish undertone … which therefore seems dazzlingly white to the eye. Like a light dusting of crushed diamonds, this white brings a dynamic and shimmering lustre to other colours in interior and exterior decorative applications. With its million pinpoints of white, it creates clean, blindingly brilliant whites and cool, timelessly modern greys, charcoals and blacks, while intensifying greens, blues and reds.

Flooring, of course, occupies at least one sixth of your everyday environment – and yet it’s most likely the least exciting surface in your home, or office. It’s also the architectural surface that has to roll out the most bang for its buck: look as good as it can for as long as it can, while enduring more scuffing, scraping, scratching and stepping than the walls and ceiling ever will, all put together! BASF has been thinking what it can do for flooring; how it can bring the full scale and scope of its innovations and technology to bear on the increasingly complex demands on flooring today.

The use of medium- and high-density fibreboard continues to grow, due to their versatility and ease of use in construction and decoration. Add to this their inherent flexibility of composition and adaptability of functionality and you have the basic building block for at least three generations of a new class of design products … 

The first, most basic approach is to add colour to the fibreboard process, using BASF’s in-depth knowledge of colour chemistry and formulation, as well its expertise in colour styling. Taken one step further, trends in design point to a need for decorative flooring to match the warm, personal character of “natural” surfaces such as wood or stone – which can be achieved through combinations of contrasting light wood fibres and dark bark in the fibreboard. Taken again a step further, elegant and refined metallic, sparkle, pearl and shimmer effects are all possible with the addition of effect pigments into the clear, protective overlay coating of decorative flooring fibreboard, producing a rich and sophisticated surface for interior design.

In conclusion … the sky’s the limit! BASF’s innovative development of materials, colours and effects provides tools for the creation of exciting, sophisticated and novel decorative surfaces – the end result’s in your hands … and we can’t wait to see it!

More information: www.basf.com