Using Pantone's 2023 Color of the Year in E-Learning #444

Pantone Color of the Year 2024 #444: Challenge | Recap

Welcome to PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz!

Pantone announced its 2024 Color of the Year: Peach Fuzz. Pantone describes the color as:

“In seeking a hue that echoes our innate yearning for closeness and connection, we chose a color radiant with warmth and modern elegance. A shade that resonates with compassion, offers a tactile embrace, and effortlessly bridges the youthful with the timeless.”

What is the color of the year and why is it important? 

• It shows what colors will be trendy in things like fashion, home decoration, and graphic design, helping set the overall style.
• Designers use it as a source of inspiration to guide their creative choices.
• Companies and brands use it to give their products a fresh and current design style.
• E-learning designers looking for trendy colors to use in their projects.

Why do an e-learning challenge on a single color?

As course designers, you often need to adhere to a company's style guide to ensure your course's look and feel align with the organization's branding requirements. 

Whether you love or hate it, get ready to see Peach Fuzz everywhere. It'll show up in fashion, beauty products, and even in the design of online courses. Peach Fuzz will be the most popular color in the coming year.

This type of design exercise is designed to stretch you by using colors you may not like. And learning to use Peach Fuzz in e-learning is what this final challenge of 2023 is all about!

Using the Pantone Color of the Year 2024 in E-Learning

View the recommended color harmonies

Pantone provides color harmonies for getting the most from this year's color. Here are some ways course designers can use Peach Fuzz in their e-learning projects.

1. Color palette: Use Peach Fuzz to create a cohesive theme color for your course. This could involve using it as a background color or incorporating it into graphical elements such as tooltips, charts, diagrams, and icons.
2. Accent color: Use as an accent color to highlight important information or to draw attention to specific areas on your slide. This could involve using the color in buttons, markers, or other interactive elements.
3. Design element: Use color as a graphic design element to add visual interest to your course. This could involve using the color in monochromatic themes, gradients, or patterns.
4. Color combinations: Use Peach Fuzz in combination with other colors to create a cohesive and visually unique theme.

Using with Tints and Shades to Create Custom Color Palettes

One of the easiest and safest ways to create a color palette is to start with a base color and use tint and shade values for the secondary colors.

• Tints: Tints are lighter shades of a color made by mixing it with white. They are used when you want a color to look softer and less intense.
• Shades: Shades are darker versions of a color made by adding black to it. They are used when you want a color to look more dramatic or elegant than its original strong color.

E-learning designers can use tints and shades as a starting point for creating custom color palettes. Here's a quick example I made using one of the slide templates from the Content Library:

Creating Custom Colors in PowerPoint with Tints and Shades

Creating custom color palettes with tints and shades is a fantastic way to create a cohesive and visually appealing design. Here’s a quick tutorial on how you can create your own tints and shades color palette. 

View on YouTube | Download the PowerPoint Template

🏆 Challenge of the Week

This week, your e-learning challenge is to design a template or interaction using Pantone's Peach Fuzz. 

You can build anything you like this week. You aim to work from a single color and show how to carry that color across your design templates.

🧰 Resources

This is our 11th Pantone color challenge. To get an idea of what course designers shared in previous color challenges, check out the previous challenges:

• 2014: Radiant Orchid
• 2015: Marsala
• 2016: Rose Quartz-Serenity
• 2017: Greenery
• 2018:  Ultra Violet
• 2019: Living Coral

• 2020: Classic Blue
• 2021: Illuminating
• 2022: Very Peri
• 2023: Viva Magenta

✨ Share Your E-Learning Work

• Comments: Use the comments section below to link your published example and blog post.
• Forums: Start a new thread and share a link to your published example.
• Personal blog: If you have a blog, please consider writing about your challenges. We'll link to your posts so your great work gets even more exposure.
• Social media: If you share your demos on Twitter or LinkedIn, try using #ELHChallenge so your tweeps can follow your e-learning coolness.

🙌 Last Week’s Challenge:

To help you nurture and embrace this week's challenge, check out the top things course designers wish they'd known when they started their careers:

10 Things E-Learning Designers Learned RECAP #443: Challenge | Recap

👋 New to the E-Learning Challenges?

The weekly e-learning challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challengesanytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.

Learn more about the challenges in this Q&A post and why and how to participate in this helpful article. 

📆 Next Week’s Challenge

• Next week's challenge (Dec 15, 2023): The 2023 challenge season is over, but I'd like your help with a couple of end-of-year roundups. Next week's challenge post will be to share your favorite challenge example of 2023. I'll compile your examples into a "Best of 2023" listicle.
• Make-up challenge: We need to make up challenge #426 (Barbenheimer) to keep our challenge numbering consistent. We had to remove #426, so I'm reworking the challenge to be more general. It will still follow the format of mixing two distinct design styles. I'll post more on that next week.
• Challenge recaps: I'm going through every challenge of 2023 to ensure your entries are captured in the recap posts. If you submitted one or more challenge demos but don't see them in the recaps, you can use this form to let me know. I'll have everything current by the end of month.

Got an idea for a challenge? Are you interested in doing a webinar showcasing how you made one or more challenge demos? Or do you have some comments for your humble challenge host? Use this anonymous form to share your feedback:  https://bit.ly/ElearningChallengeForm.