Is Pantone going extinct?
It added 224 colors two months ago. It also isn’t in our own brand guidelines. Both of those are the answer.
When did you last open a Pantone book?
For me it was a packaging job. And here’s the thing I noticed afterward. We shipped the brand palette first, as screen values. The Pantone pairing came later, for true print representation. Ten years ago that order would have been backwards. The chip came first and everything else was a translation of it.
So the question is fair. Is Pantone on its way out?
What Pantone was for
Lawrence Herbert launched the Pantone Matching System in 1963.1 The idea was simple and kind of brilliant. A designer in New York and a printer in Ohio could say one number and mean the same red. No guessing, no “a little warmer.” A shared language for ink.
For fifty years that language was also the default language of brand color. If a brand had a color, it had a Pantone number. That’s the part that’s changing.
The breakup
In 2022, the Pantone libraries started disappearing from Adobe’s apps.2 For a few months, old Photoshop files opened with their Pantone channels turned black. The fix was a plugin called Pantone Connect, on a subscription.
Designers were not thrilled. The plugin sat at 1.6 stars out of 5 on Adobe’s marketplace that October.3 The artist Stuart Semple released a free set of 1,280 lookalike colors called Freetone, available to everyone except people associated with Adobe or Pantone.4 That’s a good bit.
To be super clear on one thing people get wrong: Adobe didn’t put Pantone behind a paywall. Pantone changed its business model and the bundled books went away. Either way, a thing that used to just be there now had a monthly fee.
And the fee went up after the backlash, not down.5
Higher tiers now run $195 and $295 a year per seat.
One myth while we’re here. Pantone doesn’t own colors. Nobody can. It owns the names, the numbers and the reference books. You’re paying for the agreement, not the red.
Fair point: it’s not shrinking
If Pantone is dying, nobody told Pantone. It added 224 new colors this September. The system now has 2,614 spot colors.6 A year ago it launched an AI palette tool with Microsoft and says more than 10 million people use its platform.7
The physical guides are still $248 a set, and Pantone recommends replacing them every 12 to 18 months because the paper yellows and the ink fades.6,8 So it had a subscription model long before the plugin. It was just made of paper.
What has taken a hit is the cultural authority. The Color of the Year for 2026 was Cloud Dancer. A white.9 A lot of people called it tone-deaf, and it was the loudest reaction the program has had in years. When the color authority picks white and the internet argues about it for two weeks, that tells you something about how much weight the title carries now.
Where brand color actually lives now
Most brands we build are seen on a screen first, and for a lot of them, almost only. A screen doesn’t know what a Pantone is. It knows numbers.
Look at our own guidelines. Every Wild Places color is specified three ways. None of them is Pantone.
RGB 13, 13, 20
CMYK 35, 35, 0, 92
RGB 243, 241, 236
CMYK 0, 1, 3, 5
RGB 2, 202, 135
CMYK 99, 0, 33, 21
RGB 210, 224, 199
CMYK 6, 0, 11, 12
RGB 193, 255, 46
CMYK 24, 0, 82, 0
RGB 143, 132, 251
CMYK 43, 47, 0, 2
On a screen, math beats the swatch. I’ve watched a button that looked perfectly on-brand fail an accessibility check, because the contrast came in under the 4.5 to 1 it needed. The chip can’t tell you that. A contrast ratio can. So color work on a digital product starts with the numbers and whether people can read the thing.
The standards are catching up. The design tokens format, which is how color gets handed from design to code, shipped its first stable version in late 2025 with support for wide-gamut color.10
But I’ll be honest about the hype. The “everything is OKLCH now” crowd is early. Across more than 100,000 websites, the newer color formats show up on fewer than 2%. Plain old six-digit hex is on 97%.11 The screen-first future is here. The fancy-color-space future is not.
Why the book survives
Ink is physics. A printing press with four inks can’t make every color, and Pantone’s whole reason to exist is the colors it can’t.
Share of Pantone Solid Coated colors within a color difference (ΔE00) of 1, 2 and 5 on a GRACoL press.
Roughly a third of the library can’t be hit closely in standard process printing. If your brand color is in that third, and bright oranges, greens and deep blues often are, you need a spot ink and a number to order it by. That gap is the product.
It gets more physical from there. The same ink looks different on coated and uncoated paper. Fabric has its own Pantone system with about 2,800 colors.12 Embroidery thread, leather, powder-coated metal, a matchbox, a coaster. A lot of our identity work ends up on real objects, and a hex code means nothing to the factory making them.
Printers have their own workaround. A seven-color press adds orange, green and violet to the usual four, and Pantone’s extended gamut guide simulates 1,729 of its colors that way, with no custom ink to mix.13 It still starts from a Pantone number.
There are other systems. RAL for paint and coatings, NCS in architecture, HKS in German print.14 None of them replaced Pantone in branding, and neither did the protest palette. A shared physical reference is hard to build and easy to keep using.
So, extinct?
No. Demoted.
Pantone used to be the source of truth for a brand’s color. Now it’s a specialist tool for the moment color has to leave the screen. That’s still a real job. It’s just not the top job.
Do you need it?
Here’s what I tell clients who ask.
You need it if the color has to show up on things. Packaging, merchandise, signage, uniforms, anything printed in volume where the color is the brand.
You probably don’t if you’re software. Your color lives on screens, and the only print job is a conference banner twice a year. A good CMYK build will get you there.
And if you’re in between, pick the screen color first, find the nearest Pantone, and have one proof made on the real material. That costs less than a year of the subscription.
How we spec color now
- Start on screen. Build the palette as tokens, and check contrast before anyone falls in love with a shade.
- Translate, don’t assume. Work out the CMYK build for each color, then find the Pantone match where a job actually needs spot ink.
- Proof on the real thing. The actual paper, the actual fabric, in decent light. Mockups lie.
- Write down every address. One color, several ways to reach it: hex, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone when it’s been matched on press.
- Buy the book when the job needs it. And replace it when it fades. Don’t pay monthly for a plugin nobody opens.
The rulePantone isn’t extinct. It just isn’t the boss anymore. Pick the color for where it lives, then translate it for everywhere else.
Sources
- “Pantone,” Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone
- Adobe Help, Pantone color books in Adobe products. helpx.adobe.com
- AppleInsider, “Plugin now required to use most Pantone colors in Adobe products,” October 2022. appleinsider.com
- The Dieline, “Stuart Semple liberates color books inside Adobe software with Freetone plug-in,” November 2022. thedieline.com
- Printweek, “Pantone hikes Connect pricing”; Pantone support, Connect license pricing. printweek.com · support.pantone.com
- Pantone, Formula Guide Set, coated and uncoated. pantone.com
- Microsoft, “Pantone and Microsoft unite to enhance creative exploration through AI,” November 2025. news.microsoft.com
- Pantone, “How often should you update your Pantone graphics guide?” pantone.com
- Pantone, Color of the Year 2026 announcement; FashionUnited on the reaction. pantone.com · fashionunited.uk
- W3C Design Tokens Community Group, first stable specification, October 2025. w3.org
- Project Wallace, The CSS Selection, 2026 edition. projectwallace.com
- Pantone, Fashion, Home + Interiors cotton swatch data. pantone.com
- X-Rite, Pantone Extended Gamut guide. xrite.com
- RAL, NCS and HKS color systems. ral-farben.de · ncscolour.com · hks-farben.de