Glowing Glowing Gone: Adobe spotlights nature’s ‘most beautiful death’

• Utilising Adobe Colour’s powerful colour engine, Adobe have selected three new colours to represent the climate crisis: Glowing Yellow, Glowing Blue, and Glowing Purple.
• Adobe have extracted the specific fluorescing LAB values from The Ocean Agency’s images on Adobe Stock and converted them to RGB. In collaboration with Pantone, Adobe turned these digital values into Pantone Colour Standards, and selected the custom palette that would ultimately become the colours of climate change.
• Following in the footsteps of Living Coral (2019 Pantone Colour of the Year), Glowing Yellow, Glowing Blue, and Glowing Purple beckon citizens of the world to recognise Earth’s major ecosystems in peril.

In 2016, The Ocean Agency photographed one of the most spectacular and rarest sights in nature while filming the Emmy Award-winning documentary Chasing Coral. A coral reef in New Caledonia was “glowing” in incredibly vivid colors. Corals produce brightly colored chemicals as a kind of sunscreen against fatally high water temperatures and sun exposure. This glowing phenomenon, called coral fluorescence, is a final line of defense before the coral dies and bleaches to white. It’s been described as “a most beautiful death.”

“Only a handful of people have ever witnessed the highly visual spectacle of corals ‘glowing’ in vibrant colors in a desperate bid to survive underwater heat waves,” says Richard Vevers, founder of The Ocean Agency. “Yet this phenomenon is arguably the ultimate indicator of one of our greatest environmental challenges — ocean warming and the loss of coral reefs.”

To bring awareness of the dire circumstances of coral to surface level, we collaborated with the Pantone Color Institute and The Ocean Agency to capture the exact hues of coral fluorescence: PANTONE Glowing Yellow, PANTONE Glowing Blue, and PANTONE Glowing Purple.

With Adobe Color’s powerful color engine, we extracted the specific fluorescing LAB values from The Ocean Agency’s images on Adobe Stock and converted them to RGB. In collaboration with Pantone, we turned these digital values into Pantone Color Standards and selected the custom palette that would ultimately become the colors of climate change. Following in the footsteps of Living Coral, Glowing Yellow, Glowing Blue, and Glowing Purple beckon citizens of the world to recognize Earth’s major ecosystems in peril.

The Pantone Color Institute is the world’s foremost consultant for color trends, helping creatives understand the specific meanings of colors each season. This is the second year Adobe Stock has partnered with Pantone, curating visuals around seasonal colors to help creatives quickly find visuals in tones that are trending each season. We’ve curated a collection inspired by the Glowing Glowing Gone palette, and all of the proceeds from the sales of The Ocean Agency’s Adobe Stock portfolio go to supporting the foundation’s mission to protect our oceans.

As we explored in our Visual Trend Brand Stand, consumers are increasingly demanding that brands communicate their role in social and environmental issues. Brand loyalty now depends on this stance with visuals at the forefront of effective messaging. Our creative collaboration challenges brands and industries to adopt and use these colors, as well as Adobe Stock images provided by The Ocean Agency, to share the ocean’s warning and raise awareness around the need to take action above sea level.

At Adobe MAX last year, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen celebrated that we’re living in the “golden age of creativity,” in a moment when the “power of creativity and the ability for it to have impact has never been more relevant.” The Glowing Glowing Gone campaign will start with a challenge to mobilize the creative community to use the new range of glowing colors and create attention-grabbing art and designs that raise awareness of glowing corals and the warning they represent. The art and designs will be promoted to inspire global support for action and will be showcased at key environment decision-making events. More details of the challenge, launching June 3, can be found at glowing.org/#brief.

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