Asseti and Engineering Orange

Asseti’s primary brand colour is Engineering Orange. Once you understand what Asseti is, and add knowledge of Engineering Orange, it makes perfect sense. In fact, it explains that using any other colour for the brand would have been a mistake!

Engineering Orange & its most famous namesake

Jump in your time machine and spin the dial to 1933. The western world is building large infrastructure projects, in part to stimulate their way our of the Great Depression. One of those projects is the Golden Gate Bridge at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, and construction is just beginning (there's a reason the Golden Gate Bridge is on our About page!). It has taken years of planning to get to this stage, with workers starting to sink the main two towers into the seabed. Those two towers required 130 kilometres of galvanised steel, and already 1.2 million steel rivets have been ordered!

With those years of planning and community consultation, it is somewhat surprising to learn that the colour hadn’t been finalised. It hadn’t even got to a short list! It had been planned to be planned. That was the state of play in 1933. The Golden Gate Bridge planning committee had planned to decide the colour during construction.

During this colour consultation phase there were two main camps. One was that the bridge – like most other bridges of that day or this – would be painted a dark grey. The other camp wanted a more festive coat of paint, with the two main suggestions being yellow and blue stripes, and the other yellow and black stripes! This was for purposes of visibility, however, with the USA air force preferring the former and US navy the latter. In fairness, San Francisco Bay is notoriously foggy, and both air force and navy were concerned about visibility.

Concurrently, titan of US heavy industry Bethlehem Steel manufactured the huge amounts of required metal and shipped it to San Francisco via the Panama Canal. The metal was painted with a sealant to keep it safe from corrosion, and that sealant was a red-tinted orange colour.

Consulting architect for the Bridge, Irving Morrow, looked at his charge one morning. Morrow took the ferry to work and was struck by the huge red-orange metal structures rise out of the mist. He felt it looked magnificent! Although there was reportedly a fierce debate, Morrow got his way and the Golden Gate Bridge was to remain roughly the same hue. It was painted Engineering Orange.

Fig: international safety colours

Visibility & the clutter of data

The reason Engineering Orange was used for the Golden Gate Bridge is the same reason it or the family of ‘safety’ colours shown above are used in life rafts, broadcast towers, life vests and so on – it is considered the colour that stands out most consistently in nature. It makes elements that might otherwise have been overlooked visible.

Asseti does the same thing. Asseti makes facts, trends and insights – that might otherwise have been lost in the noise of so much data – visible. That’s how Asseti had a brand colour even before it had a name.

Most organisations have a LOT of data. The capacity to collect and store data is effectively infinite and companies often have inspection information, SCADA histories, work order logs, EAM and ERP system histories going back more than a decade. Add the vast volume of third party data available – weather records, critical incident details, air quality and so on – and using the data usefully is challenged simply by the scale. Asseti is designed to surface the elements that require attention, so that asset network operators get the information they need when it is useful.

Below are structures in the wild that require high visibility, even in poor conditions such as fog or dark. Asseti makes facts and insights visible when the asset operators and managers themselves might have missed it - usually due to the fog of too much data.

‍