Parliament | Pantone's Cloud Dancer: A Surrender to Mediocrity
by Creative Director, Bri Thomas
Pantone just announced Cloud Dancer as the 2025 Color of the Year, and I'm not here to congratulate them. I'm here to call out what this actually represents: the design industry's collective surrender to bland conformity.
Cloud Dancer isn't a color. It's the absence of one. And when the most influential voice in color—the company that literally defines how the world talks about hue—chooses to champion neutrality, we need to talk about what we're really celebrating.
The Beige-ification of Everything
Walk into any trendy coffee shop, scroll through any home renovation Instagram, browse any "elevated" brand refresh. Everything looks the same. Warm whites. Soft grays. Muted earth tones. The sad beige aesthetic that started as a Pinterest trend for overwhelmed millennial parents has metastasized into the default visual language of an entire generation.
And now Pantone—the authority that should be pushing design forward—has given this trend its official stamp of approval.
When Restraint Becomes Cowardice
Look, I understand minimalism. I appreciate restraint. There's genuine artistry in knowing when to hold back. But there's a difference between intentional simplicity and default neutrality. Between confident restraint and fearful conformity.
Cloud Dancer isn't about making a bold choice to let other elements shine. It's about making no choice at all. It's design by committee, color by consensus, creativity by algorithm. It's the visual equivalent of saying "I'm fine with whatever" when someone asks where you want to eat.
The Death of Individual Taste
Here's what really concerns me: we're training an entire generation to believe that good design means invisible design. That sophistication equals the absence of opinion. That the pinnacle of aesthetic achievement is something so inoffensive it could exist anywhere, for anyone, meaning nothing.
Individual taste is dying. Not because people lack opinions, but because we've convinced them that having strong aesthetic preferences is somehow unsophisticated. That color is gauche. That expression is excessive. That personality in design is a mistake to be corrected.
When did we decide that the goal of design was to disappear?
Pantone's Missed Opportunity
This is what makes Pantone's choice so frustrating. They don't just report on color trends—they shape them. They have the platform, the authority, and the influence to push the industry toward something bold. Something that challenges us. Something that reminds us why color matters in the first place.
Instead, they chose safety. They chose not to choose.
Imagine if Pantone had selected something polarizing. Something that made half the design world say "absolutely not" and the other half say "finally." That's what real leadership looks like. That's what moves culture forward.
The Artificial Beauty Industrial Complex
Cloud Dancer is the logical endpoint of what happens when we optimize design for mass appeal and algorithmic approval. When we A/B test our way to aesthetic consensus. When we let engagement metrics and conversion rates dictate what's beautiful.
We've created an industrial complex of artificial beauty—not artificial in the sense of fake, but artificial in the sense of manufactured. Designed by focus groups. Approved by brand committees. Sanitized for your protection.
And the result? A visual landscape so homogenous you can't tell a luxury hotel from a co-working space from a boutique dental office.
What We're Actually Losing
Color isn't decoration. It's communication. It's emotion. It's culture. Different colors mean different things in different contexts, to different people, in different moments. Color is how we signal who we are and what we value. It's how we create spaces that feel like home instead of showrooms.
When we strip color from our environments, we're not creating sophistication—we're creating sterility. We're not achieving timelessness—we're achieving forgettability.
The Sad Beige Mom Aesthetic Won
Remember when the "sad beige" parenting aesthetic was a joke? When we collectively laughed at the idea of rainbow-free playrooms and toys in only neutral tones? When it seemed absurd that someone would sand down the color from their child's wooden toys because bright hues clashed with their Instagram feed?
Well, joke's over. That aesthetic won. And now it's not just nurseries—it's everything. Pantone just made it official.
Moving Forward (In Color)
Here's what I want to say to designers, brand builders, and anyone creating visual experiences: you don't have to participate in this. You're allowed to have a point of view. You're allowed to make people feel something. You're allowed to choose colors that some people will hate, because that means other people will love them.
The goal isn't to create work so neutral it offends no one. The goal is to create work that resonates so deeply with the right people that they can't imagine anything else.
Some people should hate your brand. That's how you know you're doing something worth paying attention to.
Written by: Bri Thomas, Creative Director at Hoot Design Company