Green is cool, but its fun factor is ramped up when mixed with orange and yellow, which both sit on the warm side of things without getting too hot. All together there is an ease to this colour combination, perhaps because each colour transitions into the next on the spectrum. Truly, this combination is citrus personified – summery, sunny, and whimsical while maintaining a certain sourness, thus preventing the whole thing from being too cute to tolerate.
Orange is the colour of autumn, and of the 1970s, so even though an autumnal palette simultaneously evokes warmth and the cozy crispness of fall, it can also cause traumatic flashbacks to shag carpeting, brutalist architecture, and questionable fashions.
Blue is similarly contradictory. It is well loved, and ubiquitous in both fashion and administrative work, but this popularity is exactly what makes it so basic, so safe, so essentially neutral.
It is these dichotomies that make the pairing of orange and blue so daring. Orange is one of the most controversial colours (only yellow is more difficult to pull off), and blue is the most agreeable. Together they allow for rather low-risk experimentation.
Orange is optimism and cheerfulness. It is youthful without being infantile and warm without being hot. Green is abundance, wealth, and growth. It is calming but never stagnant. Together, green and orange are ebullient and comforting. A walk in the park on a sunny day. Do be careful though, to wear sunscreen during your walk, because orange also represents danger, and green can be sickly.
