How to get the best from orange for your branding
If you want one word for the impact of orange in branding for small businesses, we would suggest ‘confidence’. This makes sense when you consider how orange comes across: bright, vivid and vibrant. And brands have picked up and made use of these qualities for centuries since the fruit appeared from trade routes from the Far East.
If you like the sense of fun and urgency you get with orange in branding, be careful before rushing headlong to your brand designer. Colour needs to be treated carefully and wisely, and orange is no different.
Although used by luxury, high-end brands, it also has links with no-frills, budget brands, depending on how you employ it.
Read on as we dig into the colour orange and explore how you can use it in the best way for your business brand.
This series on colour psychology for businesses and their branding is adapted from Kassia St Clair’s excellent book, ‘The Secret Lives of Colour’. (The beautiful, sought-after hardback version is well worth getting hold of!). The best places to buy ‘The Secret Lives of Colour’ are direct from the publisher, from your local independent bookseller, from bookshop.org or – as a last resort – from Amazon. Although Amazon is cheaper and more convenient, it is not a force for good in the world of books. Please support writers, publishers and small businesses directly if you can.
“Orange is like a man, convinced of his own powers”
Images sourced via Pinterest. For credits see here
Wildings is a design agency in Devon. Our studio is based in Torquay, South Devon, and we provide branding for creative, hospitality and lifestyle businesses across Devon and the UK (like garden designers, interior designers, architects, floral designers). In this series, we’re looking at the power of colour in branding for small businesses, and this one is all about the colour orange. We want to help you harness the amazing characteristics of colour to maximise your small business brand: catch up on the previous article, ‘Why purple might be the perfect colour for your branding’ or explore the rest of our series on Colour Psychology for business brands →
Where does the colour orange come from?
The colour orange unsurprisingly comes from the citrus fruit of the same name which most likely originated in China. As the fruit steadily spread west via trade routes such as the Silk Road it left is mark on languages along the way.
There are a number of sources of orange as a pigment, depending on the particular hue in question:
Saffron (yellow-orange) is harvested from the crocus flower, Crocus sativus
Amber (honey-ember) is from fossilised tree resin
Ginger (auburn) is extracted from the Zingiber rhizome and gives us the familiar household spice
Minium (bright orange-red) can be found in natural deposits (lead tetroxide) or manufactured like the pigment lead white
Depending on the pigment, the extraction process can be easier or harder, giving varying costs, but the impact of orange remains the same, which we explore below.
How is the colour orange used in practice?
Because of orange’s brilliant vividness, it has a knack for conveying a sense of urgency and potential danger. This is particularly so because it can set up striking contrasts when paired with other colours.
Interestingly, it sits on the opposite side of the Colour Wheel to blue (we covered the psychology of blue earlier in the series), which typically conveys security, order and dependability; quite the opposite to the feelings orange evokes!
Orange’s characteristic sense of urgency and danger means it is commonly used in warnings, signage and alerts (a few are listed below). For traffic contexts, it is especially useful in bad weather or low light because of the high contrast it creates with dark colours.
Prison suits (common in the US rather than the UK)
Toxic chemicals (such as Agent Orange in the Vietnam War)
Terror threat levels (e.g., US Homeland Security Advisory System)
Traffic signage (common to the US rather than UK where it is confined to emergency telephones)
Warning symbols on roads (again, more the US)
Aircraft black box flight recorders
Examples of brands that have used orange include:
The House of Orange, which became modern day Netherlands, notable for its national football team
Protestants in Northern Ireland, who conduct protest marches are known as Orangemen
The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco (from which we get the official colour ‘Golden Gate Bridge International Orange’)
Hermès (luxury fashion)
Easyjet (budget airline)
How can a small business use the colour orange in its branding?
Orange is an exciting brand colour and brands have used it accordingly, which we’ll explore below.
Because of its eye-catching nature, orange has associations with boastfulness and arrogance. The advertising industry has capitalised on its natural visibility, dialling up its visual impact to the maximum possible level through neon signs - perhaps the loudest and brashest way to publicise products and services.
The brilliantly vivid nature of orange has also been capitalised on in print. Medieval manuscript illustrators used the orange-red pigment minium to highlight capitals, headings and paragraph markings in order to help them leap off the page in the eye of the reader. (N.B. This is the origin of the word ‘miniature’ - from the shade of orange, rather than to do with size or scale!)
If we turn back to ginger briefly, the natural characteristics of the spice have naturally carried over into wider associations. Ginger’s hot, pungent and exotic qualities that all compel attention have led it to be linked with redheads, often stereotyped for their fiery temper.
As you can tell from practical uses of orange above, it lends itself to context and markets where visibility and cut-through are important. On a brand level, business that want to pick up on the sense of danger or urgency, could well consider orange as an option.
Dangers of orange in your branding
As with many colours, orange can serve a variety of brands that have different aims. The challenge is to avoid unintended associations that ultimately undermine or damage your brand.
On the one hand, orange has been employed by high-end, luxury brands, such as the French fashion house, Hermès - achingly elegant and exclusive. There’s also motorcycle brand Harley Davidson, which, despite being in a very different sector, sits at the very top of its industry, offering highly-sought after motorcycles with an enviable cult following.
In contrast, orange has also picked up associations with the budget, no-frills end of the market. This is perhaps inevitable, because of its bright, fun, breezy feel, synonymous with summer holidays. As such, lower-end, mass-market brands have gravitated to it, such as Easyjet, B&Q (cf. Home Depot in the US), Fanta, Flymo and Amazon.
The key here for small businesses considering their branding is first to gain a deep understanding of their audiences and then analyse how they can appeal to customers while standing out from competitors. A brand strategist and designer will then be able to navigate how a business can draw on powerful and suitable elements of a colour, pairing them with a wider set of design elements, so that as a whole they get the right results.
One practical tip when considering orange is to explore its darker shades, which give it it a more grown-up feel. Alternatively, if you want to inject an element of fun and playfulness into a maturer brand, using orange as a supporting accent colour is a good option.
Get inspired by the colour orange
Why not enjoy the interactive orange moodboard below - click and move images around. The sources of the moodboard and image attribution can be found on Pinterest here
The mood board sources and image attribution can be found on Pinterest here
A short epilogue for the colour orange
Did you know that nude is a shade of orange? Shade refers to the pure pigment of orange, but with some black added, so the colour remains the same, only darker. In the case of nude, it is a very pale shade.
The question then is : ’nude, but for whom?’ What if I have dark skin?
The problem with nude as a shade of orange is that it assumes a pale skin colour, i.e., Caucasian, and this is simply not representative of many skin colours around the world or in a diverse society or target audience of a brand.
Despite there being many other alternative names for nude (such as sand, peach or beige), nude has proved obstinate in usage.
The lesson here is that our choices, especially as brands, can have consequences, so if your brand values include inclusivity, think carefully about using nude as a label or product description within your branding.
It might only be a label, but think of nude (orange) within your wider branding architecture and what it can or how it could potentially damage your brand.
Sand, ginger, amber, minium are some names of orange tones
Examples of brands using the colour orange
There are lots of brands using orange - here are three brands using orange quite differently to draw out their various qualities! Mandarin Stone are one of the largest suppliers of natural stone tiles, marble, limestone and flooring, as well as stone bathware in the UK. Cubitts is a spectacle company that creates handcrafted frames in the UK. They offer bespoke, made-to-measure glasses. AKT is a gender-neutral, aluminium-free deodorant balm that is made in the UK and tried, tested and approved by London’s West End performers.
If had written off orange as a budget colour or unsure how it can give your high-end brand an edge, we hope this has helped give you a new perspective on it for your small business. Watch out for upcoming instalments on colour psychology and how it feeds into your branding or browse previous articles below.
If you’d like to learn more from us on branding or get visual inspiration, follow @wildings.studio on Instagram or read more of our blogs on branding too.
