Create a Radiant Template with Pantone’s Color of the Year

E-Learning Challenge #15: Challenge Recap

Did you hear the news? Pantone just announced its 2014 color of the year: Radiant Orchid.

Described as an “expressive, creative, and embracing purple—one that draws you in with its beguiling charm,” this color is probably not in most e-learning palettes.

The color of the year is a big deal because it will influence design, fashion, home interior, and, if we’re successful, e-learning trends in the upcoming year. And that’s why it’s going to make a great challenge this week!

Challenge of the week

This week your challenge is to use Radiant Orchid as the base color for your e-learning templates.

Include at least three different content slides, and more if you’d like. Your slides can be static or built out as working interactions. Your goal is to work from a single color and show how you will carry that color across your design templates.

Tools

You can use Articulate Storyline, Articulate Studio ’09, Articulate Studio ’13, or PowerPoint to show your radiant slide designs.

Here's a color guide to Radiant Orchid's tints and shades:

Template layout ideas

Tom has some great posts on finding design inspiration, creating starter templates, and using websites to get started. If you read only one post, I’d check out the post on creating an e-learning template. It outlines the most common slide designs found in courses.

PowerPoint and Storyline downloads

Not sure where to start? Try reworking one of the free Storyline or PowerPoint templates using Radiant Orchid as the starting color.

If you decide to work from one of the PowerPoint templates, consider building out a couple of Articulate Quizmaker and Articulate Engage slides to show how your design carries across a course.

Resources

Pantone has a purple-licious Pinterest board tracking global sightings and uses of Radiant Orchid.

Designmodo pulled together some website examples using purple-pink hues.

Articles highlighting purple in web design:

Last week's challenge

To help you produce the most radiant e-learning templates for this week’s challenge, take a look at the results from last week’s quiz results makeover.

A couple users commented early in the challenge how this was a tougher challenge than most. I totally get their point—this is one of the areas I’ve struggled with, too. Hopefully the infographics tip will help us focus a little more on this neglected area of slide design.

Montse Anderson shared a mile-high quiz makeover featuring a clean layout with crisp typography. She also shared a link to her interactive video quiz with the updated results slide.

Paul Alders shared his quiz results makeover in this ruler-themed template. Paul always shares his source files so give him a big shoutout next time you see him around the forums.

Jeff Kortenbosch put his results slide under the knife to create this elegant nursing theme demo featuring some familiar characters. If you like Jeff’s entry as much as we do, take some time to read his blog post and screencast outlining his design process. Great work, Jeff!

Eimear O'Neill reworked an existing project to share this well-designed makeover. I really like how she shaded the people icons and the text treatment for the learner’s scores. Great slides, Eimear!

Nicole Legault gets two thumbs up for sharing her before and after quiz results. Nicole also stirred up a lively discussion around the use of hand gestures in quiz feedback.

Ana Lucia Barguil scored big in her winning game-based makeover. She also shared the final project and Storyline source files. Thanks, Ana!

Alex Burford shared an infographic-inspired results slide. I really liked this clean example and shared a quick idea for adjusting some of the colors to create a little more contrast. Great job, Alex and thanks for jumping into this week’s challenge!

I couldn’t resist sharing another makeover idea featuring a dynamic AtsuMeter results slide. Check out the full quiz demo and let me know what you think.

Did you know?

The weekly 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. We’ll feature your work and provide feedback if you request it.

Have an radiant week, E-Learning Heroes!

Even if you’re using a trial version of Studio or Storyline, you can absolutely publish your challenge files. Just sign up for a fully functional, free trial, and have at it. And remember to post your questions and comments in the forums; we're here to help. For more e-learning tips, examples, and downloads, follow us on Twitter.

47 Comments
Jeff Kortenbosch
Nicole Legault

Jeff - beautiful design (as usual). I particularly like the purple-shaded imagery, the social media icons at the bottom, and the nice mix of lime green and purple (those colors work great together!) Oh and I also like the shadow you added to the character! Very nice to see something other than the default shadow...Nice!! Alright, so here's my submission... This is the web design that inspired my e design: http://chilp.it/ed6ded (I randomly found this design when I was doing a Google search for inspiration) And here is the published output: http://chilp.it/f8f258 As you can see the character with the purple shirt worked perfectly with this color scheme! I used a "Freeform Pick One" slide for the scenario, and the fonts used are Bebas and Articulate. Thanks for the challenge ... Expand

David Fair
David Fair
David Anderson
Ana Lucia Barguil

You did magic with this color. Thank you all for the templates! My first reaction was "Ugh" too, but soon I had an inspiration with this magnet on my fridge: https://s3-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/antecello/Articulate-Challenge/radiant-orchid/marina1.jpg Little girls love "radiant orchid" and similar colors, so I decided to create something for them. I visited the site of Angelina Ballerina and had more inspiration: http://www.angelinaballerina.com/usa/games.asp Here is my demo: https://s3-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/antecello/Articulate-Challenge/radiant-orchid/story.html Story file: https://s3-sa-east-1.amazonaws.com/antecello/Articulate-Challenge/radiant-orchid/ARTICULATE-CHALLENGE-radiant-orchid.story Clipart Style 1581: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/images/results.... Expand

Paul Alders