We all remember the year Microsoft Word went from CD to subscription and broke our hearts. And designers, we surely remember the year that the Adobe Suite went from one-off licences to yearly payments. Well, in case you haven’t heard the news, Pantone, the world-wide colour standard for designers in packaging, print, textile and much more, have upgraded their service to something that will... make them more money.
Obviously, paying $900 for a full set of Pantone Swatch books (and they recommend you update these yearly, by the way) is simply not enough to break even, so now Pantone have created their new software Pantone Connect.
So, what is Pantone Connect, do you need it, and can you work around it?
What. Pantone Connect is a new software linked to the Pantone swatch books, and it will set you back $40USD for a yearly subscription, or $8USD if you choose to pay monthly. In the past, once you bought a Pantone swatch book you were entitled to the digital swatches that came with them. These swatches were accessed pretty easily - by typing in your swatch book registration code and importing into your Adobe programs. The functionality is similar for all the apps, but primarily here I'll reference Illustrator, as that’s the base program for packaging.
It was a little clunky and time consuming to import each book one by one, but they were there in your programs. Pantone Connect is actually a plugin, and you can download and connect the free version to your apps, however to access the new swatches you’ll need to pay the premium – or will you? Pantone Connect Premium is marketed as the “only way to access over 15,000 market-relevant Pantone Colors found in over a dozen Pantone Libraries”, and on face value it seems as though this is a cost you can’t avoid, but in actual fact that’s not the case.
Pros. Kinda. There are some genuinely interesting features in Pantone Connect Premium. It’ll give you insights into the newest colour trends on the runway, and it’ll create colour matches for you. You can input a swatch and it’ll suggest harmonious, analogous and contrasted colours. It’ll also suggest pre-set colour schemes.
The most interesting and confounding feature is the substitute feature, where you pick a swatch and Pantone will give you other similar swatches. Why do we need this? Presumably so that if you pick a swatch from a current book and it doesn’t appear in your 3-year-old copy you can swap it out. But if colours are that interchangeable there’d be no reason to ever buy a new book. Similarly, some of these substitutes do truly look exactly the same. It certainly made me doubt the amount of colours they’ve created. Are they all necessary?
Cons. The biggest con about this software is that you have to manually add each swatch to your Adobe Swatch book.
With the old system, the entire swatch book was imported and then you could just click on the colour you wanted and it was automatically in your swatches panel. Granted, this meant a bit of cleaning up at the end, but that’s a simple task. In Pantone Connect Free you’re actually more likely to not mess this up – if you just try to eyedrop you’ll hit a dead-end where they ask you to upgrade to Premium, which is annoying but at least you’ll go back and add to swatches, as it should be.
In Premium, you can eyedrop a colour to sample it, but then you have to manually decide that yes, you’d officially like it in your artwork, click on the options and add it to swatches. Make sure you do this before you go searching for more colours, or you might just forget what the colour even is. Either way, doing this for every single colour, especially in the experimental stage of your work, is just time consuming.
Work arounds. If you haven’t updated your Adobe programs to the 2022 version, don’t. Or just wait and decide how much you really want those new features. If you keep your old app, you keep your old swatch books. Much simpler.
Do you need it? Look, the software is new and it’ll get better. It’ll also get less frustrating as it simply becomes the reality. But for a while I’d say no, you absolutely don’t need it. Adding swatches to your artwork is just as slow with the Premium version as it is with the free version, and the extras aren’t really anything to write home about. Save your cash for an extra coffee at the end of the week.
Comments