The Adobe creative cloud is a huge part of a designer’s toolkit and has been for years. It is industry standard to use the Adobe software’s and is famously expensive to have use of the full suite. So, when Adobe announced in late 2021 that they were removing Pantone colours from their programs and putting them behind a paywall, the industry raged. Now in late 2022 the process of stripping the Pantone colours has completed leaving not only a subscription service to colour, but also destroying any previous artwork that used a Pantone colour, unfortunate for artists who had no way of seeing this coming. So, who are Pantone? They provide a universal language of colour that enables colour-critical decisions through every stage of the workflow for brands and manufacturers. (Pantone, 2022) Essentially, they are a colour library that maintain exact hex code colours and provide them across the globe for ease of colour matching. Without Pantone’s library on Adobe software’s such as Photoshop, fears of rising complaints and assets not meeting branding guidelines loom over the creative industry. (Clark, 2022) This controversy raises questions of law and ethics in an ever-growing capitalist society where corporations even have a monopoly over colour. As an illustrator I find the need to understand this fully to know how to use colour without the use of Pantone and whether I can even use certain colours at all without infringing on laws that might put a client into a spot of bother.
Pantone colour of the year 2022. (Pantone, 2022)
To understand this controversy, it is important to understand the difference between copyright, trademark, patents and intellectual property. Rather than researching the actual laws however, I decided to try and understand these in terms of current brands usage. Individual colours cannot be copyrighted, this is reserved only for a collection of colours within a design, the design can then be copyrighted. Colour trademarking is where a single colour can be protected for a brand as long as they can prove that it is important to their branding. This doesn’t mean that the colour cannot be used by anyone else but, it cannot be registered on the same product and could cause legal action if used on something similar, for example creating an off-brand sticky note with the same yellow as Post-it. Pantone has an interesting system for owning their colours as their library is their intellectual property, meaning that they entirely own the names for their colours. (Callil, 2014) It is then the names of their colours that have been put behind a paywall by Pantone. Interestingly, when applying to trademark a colour it is recommended that a Pantone number be included alongside the colour description, which makes the colour intellectual property of Pantone by trademarked by a company. (Smith, 2013)
On reflection it seems as though big companies have the monopoly on colour in more than one way. With colour trademarks to watch out for alongside Pantones pay walls to correctly colour match on a large scale I can identify a mammoth social issue, digital poverty and its sub-topic: colour poverty. The COVID-19 pandemic raised awareness of digital poverty when education was moved online during the lockdowns. Within Great Britain alone 1 in 10 households do not have access to the internet (Seah, 2020), meaning that education, for a short time, was locked behind a technological paywall where low-income families could not afford the equipment or internet access to access education. With those numbers in hand, it is possible to understand the percentage of people who cannot afford the technology needed to run Adobe, or Adobe subscription fees, and Pantone’s colour subscriptions on top of this puts a huge portion of the population at a disadvantage. Granted, within this number of people I am limiting down to just looking at its effect on illustrators or the art industry in general and therefore a smaller percentage is under the microscope. Within my practice personally I am using technology for my art more often, even when produced traditionally I use Adobe software’s to colour correct. Additionally, with colour vision deficiencies, a system such as Pantone becomes increasingly useful to ensure that my colours are correct for clients. With Adobe’s removal of the Pantone library unless you pay a monthly fee, this is not something that I am able to access. I predict a digital divide in design where certain clients will only use Pantone certified artists meaning that big contracts might become out of reach for a majority.
A symposium about ethics and arts investigated both emerging technologies and their uses in the arts. The inventors of the technologies forgot to speak about ethics whereas the arts only spoke of it. One of the keynote speakers identified the problem being that technology and ethics are separated into different fields and therefore ethics is not wholly considered within design. (Gentry, 2021) Perhaps this can account for the rise in digital poverty. As technology evolves into new and exciting ventures, little thought is given to whether people can actually use and afford it on a global scale.
This is very much a current issue within the design field and one that has affected thousands of artists already. I can only predict what will happen within my practice which I have done in paragraphs above but, I can also take this issue and try to discover a silver lining, or how I can get ahead of the curve here. In a previous blog post I described a style which uses an almost monotone colour palette. I have been slowly developing a muted way of working without much effect thus far but, if I cannot afford to use colour then perhaps this is what I need to kickstart a developed monochrome style. Coupled with my traditional way of working, where Pantone has no reign, it may be time to let go of standardized colours and create my own pallets that will become synonymous with my work. Below are colour samples that I have curated that fit my fantasy aesthetic and work with my colour vision as well as a painting using the palette. This experiment has boosted the development in style and enabled me to feel confident with colour. The palettes may change over time with further development as it is unlikely to have it correct on the first try, it also might change with further drawing development and trends that may influence my art. The image that I produced using this colour palette has been a tremendous success in my style discovery. It adds a level of whimsy into my fantasy drawings that I can easily bring to childrens book illustrations. I now feel confident in using this style to develop book illustrations.
Stuart Semple is a British artist and activist who has taken a stand against the colour paywalls and created his own free to use colour palette which “contains 1280 Liberated colours which are extremely Pantoneish and reminiscent of those found in the most iconic colour book of all time. In fact, it’s been argued that they are indistinguishable from those behind the Adobe paywall”. (Semple, 2022) In a recent interview Semple explained how his Freetone palette works by stating that Pantone do not own the colours, therefore his colours are exactly the same and just named differently. By using the Freetone books in your artwork you can then send it off to printers who use Pantone references, and the colours are a match. (List, 2022) With Semple pioneering art activism it seems that there is hope for artists and designers and capitalism has been pushed back. Using Freetone, I have curated a second colour palette which is digital, this should ensure that I can re-create artworks in either medium.
Bibliography
Callil, J. (2014) Meet Pantone, the company that owns almost every colour you can imagine. [Online] Available at < https://junkee.com/meet-pantone-the-company-that-owns-almost-every-colour-you-can-imagine/46819 > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
Clark, S. (2022). Adobe’s controversial colour scheme hits creatives hard. [Online] Available at < https://www.techradar.com/news/adobes-controversial-color-scheme-hits-creatives-hard > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
Gentry, A. (2021). Ethics, art and technology: the need for a human-cantered approach. [Online] Available at < https://www.a-n.co.uk/news/ethics-art-technology-need-human-centred-approach/ > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
List, J. (2022). Interview: Stuart Semple on Pantone, Freetone, colour, and open source. [Online] Available at < https://hackaday.com/2022/11/16/interview-stuart-semple-on-pantone-freetone-colour-and-open-source/ > [Accessed 23/11/2022]
Mackey, J. (2021). Digital inclusion and exclusion in the arts and cultural sector. [Online] Available at < https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/digital-inclusion-and-exclusion-arts-and-cultural-sector > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
Mar, A. (2018). Can you trademark a colour alone? [Online] Available at < https://trademarkangel.com/trademark-color-alone/ > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
Pantone. (2022). Our history. [Online] Available at < https://www.pantone.com/uk/en/about-pantone > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
Seah, KM. (2020). ‘COVID-19: exposing digital poverty in a pandemic.’ Int J Surg. PP 127-128. DOI: 10.1016/j.ijsu.2020.05.057[Online] Available at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7245204/ > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
Semple,S. (2022). Freetone. [Online] Available at < https://culturehustle.com/products/freetone?_pos=1&_sid=04364e238&_ss=r > [Accessed 23/11/2022]
Smith, J. (2013). ‘The (Pantone) colour purple: a milky path home for Cadbury’s trademark’. Journal of intellectual property law & practice. 8 (3) PP190-192. DOI: https://doi-org.ezproxy.herts.ac.uk/10.1093/jiplp/jps217 [Online] Available at < https://academic-oup-com.ezproxy.herts.ac.uk/jiplp/article/8/3/190/916310 > [Accessed 18/11/2022]
Chloe Cooper | MA Illustration 