Joshua Kissi documents African American high school marching bands in New Orleans’ Mardi Gras parade

The Bronx-based photographer captures the musicality of the marching bands while honouring the political importance of the groups, dating back to the American Civil War.

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Cait Oppermann documents the difficult and dynamic sport of takraw

Travelling back to Bangkok after seeing locals practice the game a few years back, Cait's latest series shines a light on the superhuman quality of its players.

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An alternate look at LA, a feud about ice cream and a hoodie to draw on: Here’s March’s Things

Many of this month’s entries provide respite from the real world, and let’s be honest, we need it!

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Pantone unveils over 300 new trend-based colours

A hot pink called Viva Magenta and an icy blue named Frozen Fjord are among the 315 new hues that American colour company Pantone has added to its roster of shades.

The 315 colours have been chosen by Pantone to reflect present-day and forecasted trends, and have been taken from all bands of the spectrum.

There are over 50 new shades of pink, a colour that the brand believes has "embraced new meanings and relevance beyond it's traditional gendered and child-like status". Among them are First Blush, Viva Magenta and Tender Touch.

More than 70 new blues will also be available. Some of the cooler hues, like Frozen Fjord, nod to icy natural landscapes, while brighter, green-infused shades like Exotic Plume and Gulf Coast are meant to evoke a more summery, tropical feel.

Some of the added shades – such as Weathered Teak and Island Fossil – are supposed to offer a nuanced take on neutrals and taupes, which Pantone thinks are "too often seen as a single colour" but can offer "endless subtleties".

"The colours that are influencing design today have evolved to reflect shifting societal views, new technological innovations, and a truly global outlook," said executive director of the Pantone Color Institute Leatrice Eiseman.

"Expanding and enhancing our colour palette and introducing new digital solutions ensures our design clients that they can continue to count on Pantone today and into the future, helping them to transform their creative vision into reality," added vice president Laurie Pressman.

All of the new shades have been added to Pantone's Fashion, Home + Interiors Color Specifier – a pair of ring-bound binders filled with removable coloured slips of paper or cotton that those working in the creative industries can use to develop tonal palettes for projects.

Hues inside each binder have been grouped together to form "colour families" – a move that Pantone hopes will make selecting shades an easier process.

"As you can imagine, with over 2,625 colours included in the palette, there is an enormous level of detail that Pantone has to go into to describe the colour families where a colour would fall," Pressman told Dezeen.

"Even something as simple as a yellow-green versus a green-yellow, all of these have their own place."

The launch of the new shades has also seen the company create Pantone Connect, a management system and extensive colour library that can be merged with digital design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

Pantone chose it's Classic Blue shade as the colour of the year for 2020. The company described the colour as having a "reassuring presence" that is capable of bringing "a sense of peace and tranquillity to the human spirit".

It came in dramatic contrast to Pantone's colour of the year for 2019, which was a bright shade of peachy-orange called Living Coral.

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NBBJ models Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center stadium on lotus flowers

Petal-like cladding wraps around this 80,000-seat stadium, which forms the centrepiece of NBBJ's riverside Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center in China.

The 400,000-square-metre stadium is designed to evoke the lotus flowers found in the West Lake, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Hangzhou that is celebrated for its gardens and temples.

It is teamed with series of smaller sporting facilities in the Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center, also designed by NBBJ, including a complementary 10,000-seat stadium dedicated to tennis.

"Hangzhou is one of the most scenic cities in China, and its West Lake is renowned for its beauty, elegance and unique foliage," NBBJ told Dezeen.

"The stadium draws upon this beauty by using the indigenous water lily, also called a lotus, of the West Lake as its conceptual inspiration, and then interpreting the form into a series of modular petal structures that gracefully surround the stadium."

The complex's main stadium is primarily used for football matches, however it was designed to be flexible so that it can host a range of sports events including the 2022 Asian Games.

It is built primarily from steel, with exterior facades and roof structure that were computationally-designed by NBBJ using parametrics. This was to ensure the building was as light as possible, and in turn reduce material waste and the building's carbon footprint.

NBBJ has landscaped the area surrounding the stadium with light-coloured surfaces and areas of greenery.

This landscaping weaves throughout the site to unite the main stadium with the rest of the complex, and is hoped to help reduce water run-off and prevent the urban heat island effect. An urban heat island is a metropolitan area that is made significantly warmer than its surroundings due to the modification of land surfaces.

Hangzhou Olympic Sports Center forms part of the masterplan for the new Central Business District on the south side of the Qiantang River, and is hoped to become a community and recreation hub.

The site has been developed to ensure it is open and accessible during non-game days, and therefore is complete with a number of retail spaces in addition to the sports facilities.

NBBJ is an American architecture firm founded in Seattle in 1943 by Floyd Naramore, William Bain, Clifton Brady and Perry Johanson. Today it has has several studios across North America as well as in Hong Kong, London, Pune and Shanghai.

Other recent projects by the practice in China include a "vertical campus" for Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen, and the Nanjing exhibition centre that features a peaked roof to evoke mountains.

A booming construction scene in China has led to the rapid development of cities across the country in recent years.

Last year saw more skyscrapers over 200-metres-high built there than any other country – accounting for 45 per cent of the global total. This included Kohn Pedersen Fox's 400-metre-high supertall skyscraper in Shenzhen, and Zaha Hadid Architects' Leeza Soho with the world's tallest atrium.

Photography is by Shao Feng.

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