So someone with more creative authority than me at my job has decided that one of our programs this year is going to use one of this year's Pantone color palettes. That means that all of the promotional materials, signage, programs, etc. are going to use these colors. I hate the colors so much that I'm compelled to make it everyone else's problem as well. I can't hold it in anymore.
A lot of people have said much about the Cloud Dancer bullshit. I also hate it, and it is included in the palette, but I'm not going to focus on it. Look at its compatriots.
So not all of the colors are bad. Ice Melt, Lemon Icing, and Peach Dust could be good in the right contexts. Even fucking "Raindrops on Roses" 🙄 could possibly have its merits in some situation. The problem is that, as a whole, it looks like someone took some perfectly good pastel colors and put a 15% greige filter (probably literally just a swatch of Cloud Dancer at 15% opacity) over them. The result is a muddy, dusty, desaturated dystopia.
Orchid Tint in particular is so depressing that it makes me want to die. Actually the powers that be at work apparently decided to replace it with a color called Quiet Violet from another palette:
Which basically looks like almost the same color, just made slightly warmer and with the K slider moved up 20 points or so. It makes me want to barf no less.
I also majorly take issue with Almost Aqua. The "almost" is doing so, so much heavy lifting here, considering it's a fucking WARM GREEN. Is my screen display that inaccurate? Are they trying to gaslight me into thinking that aqua is not a kind of greenish-blue but rather some kind of ash-laden and decrepit spring green? Even overlooking that, I cannot imagine willingly using a color with the word "almost" baked into the title in my designs. The lack of commitment is deplorable.
Another thing I hate is that none of the colors stand out. They're cohesive, sure, but if you only use these in your designs then it's going to look so, so bland and boring. There's no opportunity for emphasis here, and that's one of the biggest tenets of design.
So my initial plan was to take the colors and make them a little more saturated in the materials I'm designing and pray nobody notices, because I can't be staring at such bleak colors for weeks/months on end; I'm concerned it'll insidiously start affecting my mental health. Then I looked at this image that Pantone was using to demonstrate the palette in action:
The first point I will make is that these are NOT EVEN THE SAME COLORS. The parts that don't appear unrealistically washed out by the lighting are either darker or more saturated than the swatches, so obviously they couldn't even figure out a good example of how to use them exactly as presented.
My second point is that yes, the image is almost certainly AI-generated:
I'm not terribly surprised, but I'm still disappointed that they seemingly couldn't do any better than that. The whole thing feels desperately phoned in. It also sort of feels like a cry for help.
Anyway, it's wild to me that some people in 2026 are still pretending that Pantone is some great authority on design that's worthy of following. While some of their color of the year picks have been decent over the years, I've never understood the point of incorporating their arbitrary trends in designs just because.
