Pantone Color Institute, a leading authority on color, selects a color of the year every year. For 2026, it’s “an airy white hue” they’re calling Cloud Dancer.
“The cacophony that surrounds us has become overwhelming, making it harder to hear the voices of our inner selves. A conscious statement of simplification, Cloud Dancer enhances our focus, providing release from the distraction of external influences,” Pantone Color Institute Executive Director Leatrice Eiseman said in a statement.
This tickled Josh Weber, a partner at Cloud Dancer Studio in Colorado Springs, who says he and his two partners, Dustin Larsen and Nick Canaday, named the video production company after the street he lives on, Cloud Dancer Drive in Colorado Springs.
“I think that’s just a wonderful coincidence. It’s beautiful. That’s kind of cool. What an odd coincidence that is,” Weber said in an interview during which he was told about the link between the name of the color and the name of his company. “That’s kind of neat. We like just weird, kind of offbeat, coincidences — things that just kind of happen.”
Cloud Dancer studios started out as a green screen photography booth and has begun dabbling in film. “We were just a green screen photography booth,” Weber said. “We would go to Fan Expo, Denver Comic-Con or Colorado Springs Comic-Con, set up our green screen photo booth and people would come in, get their photo taken.”
Now, the three-person team has branched into producing short films. “We've just started learning how to do films, and we've made some short films. So we've done about four or five short films now,” Weber said.
The color institute has updated its selected color annually. Last year’s color was Mocha Mousse, which the institute described as “a rich, warm, soft brown that evokes comfort, nature, and the deliciousness of chocolate and coffee.”
Unlike Cloud Dancer, which doesn’t suggest a color family, other colors have revealed their appearance in the title: recent colors like Peach Fuzz (a pale peach color), Very Peri (a periwinkle blue), and Viva Magenta (a reddish shade), call to mind the color in question, whereas Cloud Dancer is less suggestive of what it will look like.
That’s probably because it’s just as much a platform for a feeling as it is a visual look: “Similar to a blank canvas, Cloud Dancer signifies our desire for a fresh start,” according to Vice President of Pantone Color Institute Laurie Pressman. “Peeling away layers of outmoded thinking, we open the door to new approaches. An airy white hue … Cloud Dancer opens up space for creativity, allowing our imagination to drift so that new insights and bold ideas can emerge and take shape.”
People can buy merchandise, including a writing journal, a coffee mug and Play-Doh in the Cloud Dancer color, the 27th selected shade since the institute began picking colors in 1999.
