A Catalonia without color

Pantone is the American company that created the color system used by virtually all graphic designers around the world: any color you see on a screen can be traced to a number-name combination, with varying grace, from its archive of colors. Furthermore, for twenty-six years, a group of company experts has chosen the Color of the Year, "a color snapshot of what we see happening in our culture that serves as an expression of mood and attitude." The 2025 color was Mocha Mousse, a "soft and evocative brown" that "continues the trend toward the expansion of neutral, genderless, and practical tones." Perhaps there's nothing we associate more with individual subjectivity than color choice, but the people at Pantone try to convince us of another equally powerful intuition we all carry within us: that collective psychology exists and, pardon the metaphor, colors our experience of the world. If they are right, we find ourselves in a time as opaque and neutral as coffee, pasty, conservative and self-indulgent as a chocolate dessert.

This general softening of pigments rhymes with the new image of Esquerra Republicana and the new weather maps of the Newscast, two chromatic-political controversies that have come together in a very short time. From the outset, I thought it was good news that well-argued criticisms quickly spread across social media. In the case of Esquerra Republicana, it's obvious that losing the historic yellow for a nothing-orange goes far beyond the merely aesthetic modification argued by the leadership, and that changing the color not only changes the identity but also ends the association of yellow with the Catalan flag and sends an undeniable message of denationalization. The transformation of the maps on the 3Cat newscasts is similar: we've gone from a vivid representation of the territory, with shades of green capturing the country's true relief, to a rejection of flat colors that blur everything and make everything more artificial. Once again, social media instantly associated this change with an ideological affiliation with Salvador Illa and his PSC, a politician and a party that right now can only be conceived in gray.

This isn't an exclusively Catalan trend: empirical studies have demonstrated and denounced the loss of color around the world in recent decades. In purely medium-specific terms, this flattening has much to do with life filtered through screens, which force us to abandon organic shapes and strong colors to optimize legibility. However, as we know since McLuhan, the medium is the message (or the massage), and favoring aesthetic uniformity inevitably ends up favoring ideological uniformity. A post-color world is also a post-political world, in which the ideas that circulate best are no longer those that offer visions of a future different from the present, but rather inconsequential nuances of what already exists. In classic flags and coats of arms, there are no grays or faded colors because an intense color is the declaration that you believe in something more than pleasing everyone.

Naturally, there is no universal science of the effects of colors and shapes, but their meanings vary with each historical moment. Minimalism can be socialist and revolutionary in the hands of the Bauhaus, or anti-political and pro-market in Swiss design. Bright colors can be associated with the revolutionary fever of the avant-garde, but also with the lack of commitment of postmodern pastiches. But since we are historical beings, these changes affect us in very real ways, and a color is the tip of an iceberg of mental associations. What remains is that no message can be reduced to its content, that form always exerts an emotional charge that goes beyond the obvious. Look at the map of the green country and look at it gray.

The conclusion that should be accepted against the chromophobia of our times is that we citizens have no choice but to also be somewhat art critics and learn to see that, behind every grey message, there is always a choice of forms that activates resonances that move us in one direction or another. Observing the particularly lucid reaction of the networks to the changes in ERC and the TNI dare say that one of the most positive legacies of the Process has been to make us more attentive to attempts at peace and to proclamations that claim to be neutral, but aren't. Writing this, I ended up thinking about the childlike typography and the surrendered green of Junts pel Sí, and I think that now, no matter how hard they try, we wouldn't let them raise their shirts in the same way again.