Color Me '24

My take on the Pantone Color of the Year for 2024

Every year, I look forward to the Pantone “Color of the Year”. It’s a chance to think about the state of society and the source of trends throughout the design and art world over the past year, and muse about the direction those trends could take in the coming year.

What is this “Color of the Year” thing?

Ever since the turn of the millennia, Pantone has published a color of the year. Other brands have tried to piggy back on the success of the concept, but Pantone is the original, and in my opinion is the best at doing this.

The 2023 color was Viva Magenta, an authentic shade of pink. I saw this color paired with purple and black pretty frequently early in 2023, especially on websites that wanted to present themselves as cool.

This year, Pantone has selected a pale orange color that they refer to as “Peach Fuzz”.

At first glance you might wonder, ‘Really?? This seemingly random color “peach fuzz” is supposed to represent a year somehow? How bizarre.’

Designers understand that color is connected to feelings and perception. We use color to help tell a story, whether we’re designing a website, or clothing, when working on interior design, or even when making a photograph.

Red can evoke feelings of passion, whether positive or negative. Blue can produce a calm feeling in the viewer, or even one of sadness. Green often reminds us of nature and gives us a feeling of health and safety.

The emotions of these colors are learned through association, very much in the same way we learn language, or how we learn to appreciate certain styles of music. What Pantone has done with the color of the year is to take this idea of story telling for a single color as far as it will let us go.

The thing about design is that it comes from a place of what we desire. The designer has in mind some idea that he or she is trying to communicate in order to fulfill that desire. Everything in the life of the designer leading up to the moment when they do their work will have an influence on them, and thus will influence their work.

But they’re designing something for the future. They’re taking an idea from their experiences and understanding of the target audience and projecting that forward into something they believe will be appreciated for the duration of its use into the future.

Peach Fuzz was selected because there is a desire among society at large for a similar set of outcomes for the year 2024. People are tired of the isolation and separation that was introduced in 2020 and has not returned in full. People miss the personal connection they had with other people before working remotely became mainstream.

People also want to have more stability in the coming year. The shifting nature of geopolitics over the past couple of years has people feeling uneasy. There is a significant aspiration out there to have a solid and stable 2024.

There’s also a general desire for increased wellness. Pantone describes the color as having:

a velvety gentle peach tone whose all-embracing spirit enriches mind, body, and soul.

Wellness in every area of life, physical, mental, spiritual, etc. is going to be a focus for a lot of people in the coming year.

This pale orange color, peach fuzz, does a good job of representing all of these ideas in a single color for a majority of westerners, because it carries a sense of calm through its low saturation, a hint of action in the hue, and a subconscious notion of skin tone for us white folks, and it offers a reassuring stable feeling because of its tone.

Again, these ideas could be learned differently in different subcultures or life experiences, and they don’t apply equally to everyone, but I think it’s a pretty brilliant choice based on the state of mind of most of society. Allow me to unpack how I see these ideas in relation to my 3 areas of relative expertise.

Technology and Peach Fuzz

Now that everyone is using technology more and in more ways than they were a few years ago, it seems to me that there is great potential for more people to start to see technology the way technologists see it in 2024. That is, technology is a tool. There are things that technology can help us with, and there are things that technology should not do for us.

With all the hype about AI and VR and meta and the metaverse, I think people are starting to see that there is no substitute for personal connection. We can use technology to bring people closer, and we should. Video conferencing can bridge the gap on distributed teams in a way that a phone call cannot. But there is still and never will be a 100% substitute for being in the same room with someone.

An in-person meeting brings so many countless nuances to an interaction that even the best future virtual reality tools won’t be able to put that person physically next to you.

So, people are embracing the use of technology more now than ever before, and hopefully are primed to begin to understand it in a healthier way. The desire for safety and stability also has the potential to raise the importance of security considerations as decision makers choose the direction they take their stack.

Now, all of this together leads me to believe that businesses will be looking for technology solutions in 2024 that better connect with their personal and business goals, and that help them connect people more effectively. Vendors with a personal touch will have an advantage over vendors who come from the old school or who offer sanitized products and services.

Theology and Peach Fuzz

There is so much to unpack as I think about the state of the church in 2024 and what we can learn through this color of the year. The world is definitively different post-covid than it was pre-covid. While a lot of things have gone back to ‘normal’, some things have forever changed, and for a lot of people, church is one of them.

From a theological perspective, I think it’s significant that the ideas behind this color of the year of personal connection and of stability are on people’s minds. Now more than ever, people want to interact with others and simultaneously have real peace.

I think as the year progresses, people will pursue this peace in all the typical ways that people have tried throughout history. People tend to look for satisfaction in self-fulfillment and at best they might find a mental reward in helping other people through a personal connection with them, but the real satisfaction they are searching for will always remain out of reach.

These desires have the potential to drive people to look for a change in their church and spiritual life. Some churches might recognize this and try to capitalize on the movement, while other churches might not. If this thinking is on-target, we could see a shift of people, particularly millennials from one church to another, from not going to church to starting to attend, or potentially leaving the church to pursue some other activity.

Of course there is no substitute for the real peace that comes from putting our cares on the One who cares for us, and finding fulfillment in fulfilling the Will of Him that sent us. I think there are some powerful ways to communicate this, and I’m sure the pastors who read my blog are already thinking of ways to do that.

Photography and Peach Fuzz

I’ve recently broken through a long-term plateau in my photography, and as I work to start generating the next level of images in my journey, the ideas of the color of the year could help me start to communicate more effectively in my work.

A lot of what I’ve done recently has a grunge feeling to it, and I think this comes from the discouragement that I’ve been dealing with the past few years. Photography, like any art, can be revealing about what’s going on inside a person, sometimes bringing things forward that even they weren’t aware of.

In this photo taken near the Susquehanna river for example, the fog and the rocks drew me in, and I liked the chaos and darkness of the environment.

It’s not a great photo, but it definitely tells a story of where my mind has been. It’s not great because it lacks a core subject. What am I looking at? Is it the bridge? Is it the river? The Rocks?

The lack of stability in my image comes from a lack of direction in my mind, and that lack of direction has resulted in much of my photography over the past few years having similar flaws.

Over the past few months, I have been working on solidifying the direction of a lot of areas in my life, taking time to reflect and think about how best to be used of God, to be a good steward of the gifts He has given me, and how best to be a light in the world.

As I think about the state of society and the desires and hopes and fears that people all around me face, I’m excited to see that people want to connect with each other, and that people want to get things done. There’s a sense that everyone wants to make 2024 a foundational year, and we’re ready to face whatever happens with more courage than before, more resolve to keep things in order, and more intent to have a more healthy perspective on everything we involve ourselves in.

This gives me the note that I need to bring purpose to my art and to try in 2024 to tell a story. Every photograph should tell a story, and the better it tells that story, the more the viewer will appreciate it.

Conclusion

So yeah, peach fuzz might seem like an odd or random color to represent a year at first blush, but there is no accident in the selection of this color at this point in time, and the things we learn from it could be just the spark we need to step into a new year with the right perspective and attitude.