Using Pantone's 2026 Color of the Year #535: Challenge | Recap
🏆 Challenge of the Week
This week, your final challenge of 2025 is to design a template, interaction, or course starter using Pantone’s 2026 color of the year.
You can use either Rise or Storyline for your example. If you go with Storyline, consider sharing your source file to help others learn from your file.
Welcome to PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer!
Pantone announced its 2026 Color of the Year: Cloud Dancer. Pantone describes the color as:
“a lofty white that serves as a symbol of calming influence in a society rediscovering the value of quiet reflection. A billowy white imbued with serenity, PANTONE 11-4201 Cloud Dancer encourages true relaxation and focus, allowing the mind to wander and creativity to breathe, making room for innovation.”
Using the 2026 Pantone Color of the Year in E-Learning Courses
In the past, we’d use Pantone's color of the year as our base color and create tints by adding white and shades by adding black.
But this year’s color is already very close to white.
If we try to tint it, nothing really happens. If we try to tint it, nothing really happens. If we try to shade it, the color turns muddy.
This means Cloud Dancer won’t work as an accent or structural brand color. Instead, it works best as the foundational color making it ideal for:
- Backgrounds
- Content boxes and containers
- Section breaks
- White space
To create color contrast and hierarchy, you’ll need to pair Cloud Dancer with an anchor color.
How to Anchor Pantone’s Color of the Year 2026
To help you get started using Cloud Dancer, Pantone created seven different color palettes and recommended color harmonies to help you find the right anchor color.
Cloud Dancer: The Color Palettes
You’re welcome to use any one of these color palettes for your template. You don't have to use every color in the palette. Pick one (or more) from a palette and use those as the basis for your designs.
🧰 Resources
This is our 13th annual Pantone color challenge. Check out the previous challenges to see how others have approached the color 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
- 2024: Peach Fuzz
- 2025: Mocha Mousse
🙌 Share Your E-Learning Work
You put in the effort, now make sure your work gets seen:
- Personal blog: If you have a blog, please write about your example from this week’s challenge and share the link with your submission.
- Social media: Please share your examples on LinkedIn and mention both David & Articulate using the #ElearningChallenge tags so we can help promote your work.
- Support your peers: With the new submission format, you can comment directly on each example. Try leaving helpful feedback on at least three projects this week.
- Community forums: Feel free to cross-post in the forums to give your work even more visibility.
🙌 Last Week’s Challenge:
Before you tackle the year's final e-learning challenge, check out the 2025 challenge highlights your fellow community members shared over the past week:
2025 E-Learning Challenge Recap #534: 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 challenges anytime 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.
