Pantone Color for 2012:Tangerine

Pantone’s Color of the Year may not be something you wait for eagerly each year, but it probably affects you more than you realize. In 2011, when Pantone elevated Honeysuckle Pink to Color of the Year, a whole lot of people (and websites) started using shocking pink for the first time. It’s because the Color of the Year becomes ubiquitous: we see it in the stores, in ads, in magazine spreads, and it seeps into our consciousness even if we don’t ever know what the Color of the Year is. Or even that there is a Color of the Year.

The Color of the Year for 2012 is Tangerine Tango, a red orange.  I’ve been predicting cobalt blue or red orange, so I was mentally prepared for it. Still, this is an in-your-face sort of color,  not one we use a lot.

How’s Tangerine Tango going to play on websites?

We’ve never built a mostly-orange website, but Customer Dynamics is a handsome blue and orange site:

Kansas City realtor Ken Jansens’s site isn’t Tangerine, but it’s proof that an all-orange site has a lot of energy.

With so little orange in our own portfolio, we decided to search the web for some juicy sites. Here’s what we found:

Justin Bird’s design site is more burnt orange than tangerine, but we like the sense of movement — including the blinking bird.

Closer to tangerine than most, Orange Amps gets a sense of loudness from its color choice — perfect for the company.

Tangerine Design had to be orange.

Same for Tangerine Sweets. They’re not great with content, but the red orange and blue is arresting.

Bravura Coaching & Image uses tangerine in a softer way.

Vandelay Design has a page of orange websites if you’re hungry for more. None can quite be called tangerine, but it wasn’t Color of the Year when they posted that page: we’ll be seeing a lot more of it in 2012.