Australian design studio Jack and Huei has proposed Bleached Coral as the colour of the year for 2020, claiming that Pantone's shade for this year Living Coral fails to highlight the ongoing destruction of coral reefs.
Art director Huei Yin Wong and copywriter Jack Railton-Woodcock, who together run the Melbourne-based studio, described Pantone's 2019 colour of the year as "tone-deaf, and downright irresponsible".
The duo's response was to hijack the colour company's branding to create their own proposal for the colour of the year in 2020, to show people that coral reefs around their native Australia are under threat of extinction as a result of climate change.
"Pantone was in the best position to draw attention to this issue, and they didn't ? which is one of the points we're trying to make," explained Yin Wong and Railton-Woodcock. "It's the responsibility of all of us, creative or otherwise, to find creative solutions to big problems, and right now there aren?t many problems facing humanity that are bigger than climate change."
Bleached Coral matches coral ravaged by climate change
The designers went through Pantone's swatch library and pulled out the shade P 115-1 U, which matched the shade they recognised from images of dying coral in the Australian press. They gave it the name Bleached Coral.
P 115-1 U is a very pale blue shade, matching the coral that loses its colour because of the effects of climate change.
When water temperature rise...