Every year, our design team eagerly awaits the big announcement from the Pantone Color Institute on the official Pantone Colors of the Year. Gate 39 Media’s Lead Designer, Nick Landsberger, reviewed last year’s Pantone Color of the Year, Viva Magenta 18-750, a color chosen to promote a feeling of empowerment, optimism, and joyous self-expression. This year, he offers his thoughts on the 2024 Color of the Year.
For over 20 years, Pantone’s Color of the Year has influenced product development and purchasing decisions in multiple industries, including fashion, home furnishings, and industrial design, as well as product packaging and graphic design.
The Pantone Color of the Year selection process requires thoughtful consideration and trend analysis. To arrive at the selection each year, Pantone’s color experts at Pantone Color Institute comb the world looking for new color influences.
By keeping our finger on the pulse of color trends, our design team remains informed to help advise on aesthetic decisions with website design customers who turn to us for website design or a re-design of an existing financial, professional, or agricultural services website.
According to Pantone, the official color of 2024 is PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz.
What is Peach Fuzz?
According to the Pantone Institute:
“PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz captures our desire to nurture ourselves and others. It’s a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul.
An appealing peach hue softly nestled between pink and orange, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz inspires belonging, recalibration, and an opportunity for nurturing, conjuring up an air of calm, offering us a space to be, feel, and heal and to flourish from.
Sensitive but sweet and airy, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz evokes a new modernity. While centered in the human experience of enriching and nurturing the mind, body, and soul, it is also a quietly sophisticated and contemporary peach with depth whose gentle lightness is understated but impactful, bringing beauty to the digital world. Poetic and romantic, a clean peach tone with a vintage vibe, PANTONE 13-1023 Peach Fuzz reflects the past yet has been refashioned with a contemporary ambiance.”
Mirroring the trend of recent years, this choice reflects a shift towards more natural, comforting colors in design and marketing landscapes. Building on the legacy of vibrant predecessors like magenta, Peach Fuzz presents a softer, more approachable aesthetic. They’re both warmer colors, but this one’s softer, brighter and a little bit more of an earth tone than magenta. This selection aligns with Pantone’s recent inclination towards colors that infuse modern design with an essence of nature.
Case Study: Technology
This bright peach would be traditionally considered softer and driven for marketing products. If you look at trends and look back on the way that Pantone has been selecting their colors, they seem to emphasize something that they think is being deliberately used in our lives today. A lot of cosmetics and pharmaceuticals currently utilize this color, but on the flip side of this is technology.
Apple, for example, has been releasing their devices with new colored palettes for years. So gone are the days of the traditional black and white, and now they’ve brought in colors, which is something they do across all their devices and across their entire history as a cycle. What they like to do between their colors is switch back and forth between how it’s treated. For example, is it more muted like a Peach Fuzz, or is it brighter, like a coral orange iPhone? This is being seen more commonly in technology design.
What’s interesting about this color, too, is that it has metallic applications. Staying with the technology example, not only are devices being used with that color, but you’re also kind of seeing it be kind of put and expressed through metals. So, if you add metallic properties to peach fuzz, it would look more like rose gold on a device. And that’s something that’s interesting that we’re seeing a lot more, because previously, especially in the mobile device space, colors and technology has been about being sharp, sleek designs.
Pantone also provides Motorola as an example. In 2004, the Motorola Razr was a very thin, sleek flip phone. Now, they’ve brought back a version of the flip phone, but instead of promoting it as sharp or cutting edge, they are advertising their flip phones in rose gold. And to complement this rose gold, they have patterns and background images in their marketing collateral utilizing peach fuzz. So, it’s a little warmer, and I find the contrast of that mixed with modern technology to be pretty interesting.
Use in Financial Services
I think that there is a place for this color specifically in the financial services realm where we see a lot of different shades of blue. Peach Fuzz would be extremely effective as a supplementary color.
As far as a primary color application used for design in the financial space, it would take, in my opinion, a brave company or another sort of disruptor within the space to apply this sort of color within their own branding to be the primary focus. Again, I think it would serve more, which can be good as an attention-grabbing piece and to kind of disrupt the current fold. And, I think it would take a company with an attitude and a brand identity that is trying to exclusively differentiate themselves in a position to utilize the color.
Peach Fuzz can exist and be marketed in digital space, so companies can design with brighter, softer colors and still come across well on a screen. This is important for brand recognition. And a color like Peach Fuzz would certainly be unique and recognizable. If a company were to use an exclusively bright, warm color as the primary color and make an entire logo that way, it’d be something that we haven’t really seen much of, making it unique. But because we have a digital space to advertise in, it could be pretty effective.
Pantone’s choice of Peach Fuzz for 2024 opens a new chapter in color trends. Its potential impact across different industries, from technology to cosmetics, makes it a color to watch in the coming year. As we embrace Peach Fuzz in our design and marketing efforts, its warm, earthy tones promise to bring a fresh perspective to our projects.
Have questions about your current color palette or how color influences key calls to action in your website? Connect with us today and let’s explore how aesthetics, colors, and images within your website truly do impact your business’s bottom line.
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