Pantone’s Colour of the Year Announcement is Back in the Buzz
Cloud Dancer is nothing short of an unsurprising swirl of stale vanilla on a dull December morning.
On a cool December morning, my priorities are as translucently clear as the snowflakes that never touch my hometown. But no matter what I am doing, the satiety from hot food and comfort from wispy quilts are always there, the only anchors I need to pass the winters.
However, there’s always a disturbance in the wind, a storm is always brewing, and some entity is clawing its way to tug at the fabric of the cosmos. December is the month of announcements: word of the year, game of the year, this of the year, that of the year. I do have some vested interest in these, what with my feet entrenched in pop culture, but the rest? They’re the buzz I can buzz away.
Among these is Pantone, the colour giant that monopolises its colour language standards for efficient colour communication and terrorises artists, typesetters, designers, media houses, and anyone using proprietary software like Adobe’s suite.
As if it were of any significance, Pantone, like the uncle who tries to mingle with the cool kids, tries to enforce its colour of the year.
I usually never give two excrements in the general direction of these announcements, but the handpicked colour for this year is as cloudy as my December mornings, to say the least.
Cloudy with a Chance Of . . . Erm, What?
The Pantone colour of the year, or COTY, as we should call this stupidity, is Cloud Dancer.
And I have a long list of problems with it.
Before I begin, go ahead and click the link above to see the colour in all its un-glory.
Notice something? If you do, please shoot me an email with your analysis of what your eyes decipher in the smudge of unnoteworthiness.
Because all I see is nothing. Not void. Nothing.
The colour, or the hue to be more specific, is so uncharacteristically neutral and boring that I probably won’t even notice film grain over it.
To help rock your senses, the copywriters at Pantone whipped out their trusted graphite-tipped writing implements to craft an entire page and a story around a colour that you’ll only notice if it were paired with other vibrant and pastel hues.
Here’s the brilliant nothingburger, typed with sincerity:
. . . a lofty white that serves as a symbol of calming influence in a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection . . . Cloud Dancer encourages true relaxation and focus, allowing the mind to wander and creativity to breathe, making room for innovation.
To be honest, I sympathise with the writers here. Crafting a compelling argument for a colour to which your company has only added a specific recognizable value for easier communication between creatives is, well, daunting.
So instead of focusing on the USP (which they don’t need to, given that the moment you click on any link on their page, you’re hit with a soft login paywall), they found the whitest of greys with a hint of coffee stain their target.
Lofty? Yes, it is quite lofty to think that looking at the colour would bring calm in society. Except society is too busy looking at the Lava Smoke clouds of ash and dust, left in the wake of many unnecessary wars.
True relaxation? That won’t come in a society too busy to numb itself through narcotic substances, such as cocaine in powdered form that resembles Pantone’s selection.
Now, the next bit in that copy is a masterclass in mismatch. “Focus,” the poor word that is already under enormous strain in the social media jungle, is immediately hit in the gut with “allowing the mind to wander.” The two aren’t exactly the same.
Now, look here. I know what they were trying to convey. But from the experience I can extract from under my skin, it is the intense, rather dramatic colours that catch my eye and dissolve everything else in a blur of ink-in-water cloudiness. That’s what I call focus.
Wandering of the mind? That will happen when Pantone’s chosen victor is almost the shade of a blank canvas.
Okay, enough with the copy. But wait! What’s with “Dancer” here?
The colour only shines when paired with everything else. If anything, it’s the epitome of a silent support, a metaphorical scaffolding that allows other colours—which Pantone itself suggests—to bring out their best.
So . . . how can this colour be a dancer? Tonal mismatch? Ha!
The Right Shade of Skullduggery
Year after year, Pantone’s colour becomes the focal point—unlike this year’s colour—of discussions. A hotbed of comments and opinions, if you will.
Because now that this information is out there in the open, any design or art influencer worth their salt will shift their gears towards capitalising on the trend that Pantone creates. Much like a heavyweight star leaving a gravity well after it collapses under its own weight.
But Pantone isn’t collapsing, is it?
Only a couple of months ago, I sat myself through Business Insider’s exploration of Pantone’s monopoly in their So Expensive series.
For a company that had a winning card in its deck, Pantone did its customers dirty.
You see, Pantone’s IP is not the colours, which it so dramatically names and selects as end-of-the-year attention-seeking desperate hues. It’s the standardised codification of said colours and their distribution throughout the industry that makes them a studio-hold name.
That alone, quite frankly, made them famous and their library of guides and colour systems an instant buy.
But it wasn’t enough. It’s never enough.
So, like every greedy late-stage capitalist wanting to twist the Cloud Dancers of its customers, the company’s top brass went the MBA-favourite way: exorbitantly-priced subscriptions to make their customers cry tears of Haute Red.
In all likelihood, they probably took a page out of their buddies at Adobe. But that doesn’t absolve them from holding their clientele hostage, with absolutely no way to escape.
If only there were alternatives, you know? A truly free market! One devoid of monopolies, duopolies, or oligopolies. Something in the same vein as the humble VLC media player and its equally humble creator.
Alas, until that day comes, designers will have to contend with enshittified subscription services for ensuring the printers don’t f-up the colours of our brands. I, on the other hand, will marvel at the opportunity Pantone provides to pan their year-end announcements with a massive load of Acid Lime mixed in.
That is, of course, until the festivities of 2025’s grave and 2026’s birth role in. Then we’ll all forget what colour Pantone was nominating in the press to stay relevant. It will all vanish in a puff of Cloud Dancer smoke.
