The Tale of The Orange Colour

The graphical design profile of ExploCrowd is rather clear, with the orange circle symbolising collaboration, and the orange colour highlighting what is important while keeping the rest of the information in black or greyscale. This is an efficient way of communicating, and we observe several companies changing their graphical profile lately.

This is the story of where our orange colour come from.

Many years ago, when we were sailing in the Maersk Sailing Club, we were not impressed by the fact that most of the sailing clothes available was either black or dark blue. If you end up in the water, it is impossible to see you in the big waves, and since we were coming from the oil business, which has a strong safety culture, we were trying to find sailing clothes with safety colours, without much luck.

After a few years, the sailing gear brand Musto started their Fire Orange line, but most regretfully only produced Extreme Offshore Sailing Gear with face protection and such. And we can’t really defend Volvo Ocean Race style for extreme weather equipment while sailing within the Norwegian fjords. We did, however, purchase a couple of bright orange windbreakers for sailing.

We had purchased an old 26 foot Albin Express from 1980, which should be used for sailing regattas outside Stavanger. The old lady was ‘cigarette coloured white’ and had about 300 holes from different owners and equipment solutions over the years - and it needed a massive overhaul. The holes were fixed and top painted white - and then the rest of the boat looked horrible. The solution was to foil the sailing boat in a dark grey ‘stealth’ colour. Out of practical purposes. And it worked really well.

We also decided to paint the tiller orange, to highlight what is important when you are sometimes running around the sail boat when handling both ropes and being on the helm - and the orange colour made sure that it was somehow always within focus of the eye. It turned out to be really efficient.

When starting up the new ExploCrowd Company, the orange colour was chosen to highlight what was important, and tone down less important details with a greyscale. The graphical profiles has changed through time, simplifying and strengthening the layout, as it will do, when you get better ideas with time.

It is a constant evolution. But now you know where our chosen colours have originated.