For decades, the Pantone Matching System felt untouchable. It was the global color referee, the shared language between designers, printers, manufacturers, and brands. Pick a number, send a file, and trust that your blue in New York would resemble your blue in Tokyo. In an industry defined by interpretation and subjectivity, Pantone offered certainty, and for a long time that promise mattered.
Today, it barely registers.
Pantone isn’t literally gone. Pantone still publishes swatch books, still announces a Color of the Year, and still lives inside print workflows and manufacturing pipelines. Yet creatively and culturally, PMS has slipped from foundation to footnote, not because designers stopped caring about color, but because design itself fundamentally changed.
Pantone was built for ink, specifically spot-color printing and physical production. It solved a real industrial problem at scale, and for its time, it was revolutionary. Modern brand systems, however, no longer begin on press. They begin on screens. They live inside interfaces, dashboards, apps, motion systems, accessibility layers, dark modes, and component libraries, where designers think in Hex values, RGB, contrast ratios, and design tokens long before they ever think about paper stock. Color is now expected to adapt fluidly across environments, devices, and contexts.
Tools like Figma and Adobe already manage color as part of living systems rather than static specifications. Pantone offers swatches, while modern brands require ecosystems. That gap matters.
The breaking point arrived in 2022, when Pantone removed its color libraries from default access inside Adobe apps and pushed designers toward paid subscriptions simply to retain visibility of their existing colors. Files opened with missing swatches, legacy designs rendered black, and teams were forced to repurchase access to colors they had already chosen. This wasn’t merely a pricing issue; it was a trust issue. Designers began to realize Pantone no longer existed primarily to support creativity, but to monetize dependency, and once that trust eroded, Pantone’s authority quietly followed.
Even before that moment, the system’s core promise had been unraveling for years. Pantone was supposed to guarantee consistency, yet anyone who has spent time in production knows how fragile that idea always was. Paper alters color. Coatings shift saturation. Lighting changes perception. Vendors interpret formulas differently. The same Pantone number can look noticeably different across substrates and environments. Consistency was always aspirational rather than absolute.
Experienced designers adapted accordingly. They stopped relying on a single code to ensure fidelity and instead built processes around proofing, calibration, and contextual judgment. Color became experiential rather than mechanical, while Pantone never truly evolved past its mechanical roots.
At the same time, branding itself underwent a fundamental transformation.
Traditional identity systems were static, built on fixed palettes, locked rules, and immutable standards. Modern brands behave more like software. They are adaptive, responsive, and context-aware, with color expected to scale across physical and digital environments, motion and interaction, accessibility requirements, global audiences, and evolving platforms. At Xhilarate, we don’t design palettes in isolation. We design color architectures: semantic relationships, tonal ranges, and emotional hierarchies. Color today is less about selecting a shade and more about orchestrating perception.
Pantone was built for specification. Modern branding is built for experience.
This philosophical shift also explains why Pantone’s Color of the Year now feels increasingly disconnected from contemporary design culture. Once a widely anticipated signal, it now lands more like a marketing ritual. In a world shaped by microcultures, algorithms, and personalized aesthetics, the idea that one centralized authority can declare a universal color moment feels outdated, as creative culture no longer moves in unison but fragments, recombines, and evolves in parallel.
Meanwhile, the tools designers actually rely on have moved decisively toward openness: Hex values, CSS variables, perceptual color models, design tokens, and API-driven workflows. These systems are shareable, machine-readable, and platform-agnostic, integrating seamlessly into digital pipelines and generative environments. Pantone’s closed ecosystem stands in direct contrast. Its business model depends on proprietary ownership of color definitions, but modern creative systems thrive on flexibility and interoperability. In AI-powered workflows especially, color must be dynamic, adaptable, and embedded directly into evolving frameworks. A licensed chip code doesn’t meaningfully participate in that future.
Closed systems don’t scale creativity the way open ones do. And that’s why Pantone wasn’t replaced by a new standard. Its influence simply fragmented into a broader ecosystem of tools and frameworks, where color now operates as part of living systems rather than a centralized authority.
Pantone once centralized color authority. Today, color lives across networks of tools, disciplines, and contexts. Designers operate inside perceptual color spaces, accessibility standards, brand-specific tonal systems, environmental lighting considerations, and responsive UI frameworks. Color has become relational, adapting, responding, and evolving as part of larger creative systems, with no single company owning that process anymore.
Here’s the truth many in the industry haven’t fully articulated yet: designers stopped thinking in Pantone years ago. They think in experience, interaction, and perception.
Pantone still has a role in print production and manufacturing, remaining useful when specifying packaging or managing physical fabrication. But it no longer defines creative thinking, and that distinction matters.
Pantone helped build the modern design industry by giving creatives a shared language when none existed. That contribution is real and worth respecting. But relevance isn’t permanent. As design expanded beyond ink into interfaces, systems, and intelligence, Pantone stayed anchored to its original paradigm.
Design moved on.
Color today is fluid, contextual, adaptive, and systemic. Pantone remains static.
So no, Pantone isn’t truly dead.
But it is no longer foundational.
And designers, quietly and collectively, have already updated their workflow, even if they haven’t updated the obituary.
