Colour
4 min read
Sampling a palette from the real world
Glaze tiles, rail signals, birch catkins. Why our best palettes come from photographs of the client’s world, not from a colour wheel.
Our best palettes do not come from a colour wheel. They come from photographs of the client’s own world: the glaze tests in a kiln, the signal lamps on a railway, the underside of a birch catkin.
How we sample
We shoot a few hundred reference photos during the brief week, pull colours from them in batches and test the candidates against real interfaces and real print. Most do not survive contact with a phone screen in sunlight.
The ones that survive carry a story the client can tell. Oda’s customers can match every box to the glaze on the plate inside it.
The accent rule
We keep one loud colour per brand and use it sparingly. On this site it is the lime on the ribbon. Everything else is there to make that one colour feel earned.