The Blue/Orange Singularity: Why Brands Must Evolve Their Colour Thinking

A sea of aesthetic monotony.

There was a time when colour in design was expressive, instinctual, even a little dangerous. A vivid scarlet screamed revolution. A deep green suggested decadence. Brands once chose colour the way composers pick keys: to move people.

Then came the systems. Newtonian wheels, Bauhaus rationalism, and colour psychology. Suddenly, color wasn’t emotional , it was strategic. Blue meant trust. Orange meant energy, a clean contrast built given validity through a long road of western cultural conditioning, not any universal, or even empirical, truth. However, in the modern age it is now considered a dependable duo.

But in 2025, following this societal expectation, the years and years of design propaganda ingrained into generations of people, these colours aren’t decisions anymore. They’re defaults.

They’ve become the automatic answer to every branding question, not because they still move us, but because they’ve stopped making anyone uncomfortable.

And that’s a problem.

OVERDIALING THE Saturation of Blue and Orange

Blue and orange weren’t always overused. They earned their place: blue can evoke professionalism, logic, and calm; orange, vitality, confidence, and play. The contrast between the two is high-impact, screen-stable, and emotionally legible. It’s no wonder these hues became the visual shorthand for tech startups, food apps, health services, and entertainment brands alike.

But repetition breeds indifference.

Walk down a high street or scroll through a SaaS directory, and you’ll find brand after brand dressed in the same uniform. Blue and orange used to say something. Now they say, “we ran A/B tests and got nervous.”

What was once strategic has become habitual. And in design, as in culture, habit is where expression goes to die.

The Pitfalls of Chromatic Safety

Over-reliance on familiar colours creates more than visual fatigue. It dilutes brand meaning. Neuroaesthetic studies show that novelty triggers attention and emotional memory, while overexposed stimuli fade into the background.

By using what “works,” brands lose their ability to surprise, differentiate, and embed themselves in memory. What was once pleasing becomes generic. What was once communicative becomes invisible.

And perhaps most critically: repetition erodes intent. Colour becomes not a deliberate choice, but a symptom of design autopilot.

Colour After Certainty: Designing in a Responsive World

Design has always followed the conditions of the time, the tools we use, the spaces we occupy, tand he rhythms of how we live. And we are not living in static conditions anymore.

We move between daylight and dark mode. We swipe through palettes that shift with mood, time, and context. We interact with layered interfaces, spatial environments, and reactive light. We live with screens that know when we’re looking.

And yet, our colour systems still behave like ink on a page.

This isn’t a technical gap. It’s a theoretical one. Because colour, as we now experience it, doesn’t just sit still. It flexes, reacts, and adapts.

This applies to watching a video in a dark room or seeing an anamorphic ad on a building. For example, if you design in a spatial environment, say, a retail AR installation, you quickly learn that colour can’t be prescribed. What feels electric on a monitor might fade under sunlight or pulse unnaturally in motion. Colour must be ecological: shaped by light, depth, material, and atmosphere.

The same is true in interface design. Repetition dulls perception, not just emotionally, but neurologically. Our brains crave variation, surprise, and subtlety. When every dashboard glows the same shade of “trustworthy blue,” our attention slips. Novelty becomes value. Nuance becomes engagement.

Younger generations expect not just inclusivity in people, but plurality in visual language. A palette that resonates in Seoul might feel antiseptic in Madrid. An interface that soothes in Stockholm may seem lifeless in Nairobi. The global design language isn’t singular anymore; it’s a spectrum. Colour needs to respond to that.

All of this to me points in one direction: we can no longer treat colour as fixed.

Colour must be treated as living, shaped by space, time, culture, cognition, and intent.

If the old colour wheel gave us structure, the new one must give us movement.

Before we can do that, though, we need a way of thinking that matches our visual complexity. Not a rigid rulebook, but a responsive framework:

• Context Where and how will colour be experienced? Does it work in motion, under changing light, across multiple devices?

• Cognition Does the color choice stimulate engagement, or is it so familiar that it fades into the background?

• Culture Does it respect the emotional and symbolic meanings tied to place, audience, and time?

This isn’t a checklist. It’s a mental model, a way to move beyond default palettes and begin designing for real, lived perception.

Chromatic Shifts Already Underway

We’re beginning to see this shift in the wild , in pockets of visual innovation that reject the legacy palette in favor of something more contextual, more felt.

There’s the quiet rise of pastel futurism , where soft lilacs, mint fog, and warm greys soften the sharpness of legacy tech branding. There’s the biomimetic lushness of cyberorganic palettes, fusing neon energy with earthy tones like moss, clay, and volcanic black.

My examples of some more advanced color palettes that break away from the safety.

Some experimental platforms now use colour as motion: hues that subtly evolve during a user’s session, responding to interaction rhythms, environment, emotional state, or even biometric feedback. Interfaces that shift, not just in function, but in feeling.

One example at the brand identity level is Nokia’s 2023 rebrand, which broke away from its historic blue and replaced it with a flexible, modular system. The new logo was designed to shift in tone and colour depending on use , from digital environments to industrial signage , emphasizing adaptability over legacy recognition. While the move was met with mixed reactions, it nonetheless marked a rare case of a major brand acknowledging that visual identity today must be responsive, not rigid.

These are not just new aesthetics. They’re early signs of design systems trying to catch up with how we now live and sense.