Is Pantone Still Speaking Our Language?
Pantone’s Cloud Dancer is a reminder that in B2B, colour is defined not by swatches but by the environments where brands must work harder to stand out.
Pantone has announced its Colour of the Year for 2026: Cloud Dancer. A soft, ethereal white framed as a moment of clarity in a noisy world. A blank canvas. A pause. A reset.
It’s a poetic sentiment. But for me, as someone who works with colour every day, it prompted a different question.
How relevant is Pantone now, especially in B2B?
Pantone’s Cloud Dancer is a reminder that in B2B, colour is defined not by swatches but by the environments where brands must work harder to stand out.
For years, Pantone was the authority because print was the medium. You specified a spot colour because your brand lived on brochures, business cards, folders, annual reports and exhibition stands. Brand consistency depended on a consistent ink. But that world has changed. A lot.
Today, most B2B brands rarely enter the physical realm. Almost their entire identity lives in screens and digital experiences. RGB and HEX have replaced ink as the tools of choice. And because digital environments shift subtly from device to device, the obsession with absolute accuracy has softened. The brand is experienced through motion, interface and context far more than through a perfect swatch match.
In that world, perhaps Pantone isn’t the authoritative guide it once was.
It has a strong legacy, yes. But influence? Less so.
Brand teams working entirely in digital often don’t even include a Pantone reference in their guidelines. Why would they? The work never touches paper.
Interestingly, though, the analogue world hasn’t disappeared. It has just changed shape. Traditional print has declined, but environmental branding remains critical. Large-scale murals, signage, painted walls, physical installations, PPE, industrial surfaces, vessels, equipment. When brands want to make an impression you can’t swipe past, they go bigger and more tangible. And here’s the crucial point: This analogue resurgence doesn’t use Pantone.
It uses RAL.
RAL is the colour language of the industrial world. If you work in sectors like energy, maritime, subsea, construction or heavy engineering, you already know it. RAL colours are what you use when you’re specifying a fire hydrant, a subsea module, a shipping container or a piece of offshore infrastructure. They’re chosen for durability, consistency across materials and global standardisation.
In other words, RAL is the real-world colour system for B2B.
So as environmental branding becomes more creative and more physical, it’s RAL—not Pantone—that defines how colour appears in the environments where B2B brands increasingly show up (and show up on a large scale).
All of which makes Pantone’s choice of off-white especially interesting.
On one hand, it feels like a PR manoeuvre designed to spark conversation in a world where Pantone is fighting to maintain cultural relevance. On the other, it’s a quiet response to something very real: the colourful visual onslaught brought on by AI.
AI-generated imagery has pushed colour to extremes. Everything is brighter, louder, more saturated, more intense. In that context, white feels neutral and intentional. A reset button. A pause between two noisy eras.
Pantone choosing white speaks more to Pantone’s position in 2026 than to any real shift in how brands are using colour. Because the truth is, B2B brands are working in a completely different space now:
- Increasingly digital, where colour is device-dependent
- Increasingly industrial, where RAL shapes the real world
- Increasingly overwhelmed by AI visuals, where restraint could be a differentiator
Pantone remains part of the design conversation. It always will. But in the B2B world, the systems that matter, and the visual expression of your brands colour, have moved on.
And maybe that’s the real blank canvas Cloud Dancer represents: not simplicity, but a shift in what defines colour’s role in how brands show up.
