Orange S.A. is the French telecommunications group formerly known as France Télécom, and its visual identity is built around a single element: an orange square containing the lowercase wordmark “orange” in white. The mark was created in 1994 for the launch of the Orange mobile network in the United Kingdom and has remained unchanged since then, even as the brand expanded internationally and eventually replaced the France Télécom corporate name in 2013.
Design and History
The Orange brand launched in the UK on 28 April 1994, when businessman Hans Snook and his team relaunched the struggling Rabbit mobile network under a new name and positioning. Snook worked with brand consultancy Wolff Olins to establish the brand foundations, built around human values described as simple, friendly, honest, refreshing and dynamic. The brief called for a name that was warm and friendly with a matching color palette, and a logo that did not look like the fruit, which has remained iconic and unchanged to this day.[1]
Wolff Olins was responsible for designing the brand values and the logo.[2] The launch was accompanied by the slogan “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange,” created by advertising agency WCRS.[2]
In 2000, France Télécom acquired Orange for €39.7 billion, a price that was double the value of all Orange assets, the balance being attributed to the power of the Orange brand.[1] France Télécom then gradually extended the Orange name across its operations: in 2001, its mobile offers Itineris, Ola and Mobicarte were rebranded Orange in France, and in 2006, the internet service Wanadoo and business unit Equant also adopted the Orange name.[3] In July 2013, France Télécom changed its corporate name to Orange, making the orange square the sole identity of the brand.[4]
In 2015, twenty years after designing the original brand, Wolff Olins completed a visual identity refresh for Orange. The logo itself remained unchanged. As Wolff Olins partner Cummings said at the time, “It still has the strength and simplicity that it had when we designed it 20 years ago.”[5] Instead, the refresh introduced a new visual system built around six themes identified as essential to customers: home, work, money, wellbeing, fun and family. The system uses a square containing a customer insight, followed by a cut-out shape showing Orange’s response to a product, service or benefit.[6]
Meaning and Symbolism
Orange’s official brand history states that the logo was designed so that it “didn’t look anything like the fruit.”[1] The square format was chosen deliberately to give the brand strength in the business world, similar to marks used by American Express and Hertz, and to establish the color orange itself as the brand’s identifier.[7]
The color orange was described by Morgan Holt, strategy director at Wolff Olins, as “the color of optimism, of creativity,” which France Télécom drew upon when it adopted the brand for its French operations.[8]
Typography and Design
The current Orange logo consists of a solid orange square with the word “orange” set in lowercase white letters along the bottom edge. The official brand color is #FF7900, as specified in Orange’s own design system documentation.[9]
Orange’s brand guidelines state that Helvetica Neue is the primary font for all brand communications.[10] The brand’s core color palette is described as black, white and orange, with supporting colors used in addition.[10] In the 2015 identity refresh, five new supporting colors were added to the palette: blue, yellow, violet, green and pink, while the typography remained the same but was made clearer and more prominent.[11]
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