Orange Data Mining

Branding. Web design.

Orange is an open-source data mining and data visualization program. It was developed by Biolab at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science in Ljubljana. The specialty of Orange is that the interface is super friendly, so that anyone can use it without knowing how to code.

Orange got its first face 20 years ago. Why orange? Rumours say that the members of the Biolab at the Faculty of Computer Science and Informatics first gave the data analysis program the name Blue. But than they thought the blue color was too boring, so someone shot back: “So, why not orange than?". The rest is history.

This year Biolab members decided to refresh the website and asked me to help them. I redesigned their visual identity and web page. We gave the little orange guy a bigger smile, better haircut and glasses with a smaller dioptry. He became smarter, more handsome, and sociable scientist.

The biggest challenge was to draw his big and kind smile, which in some sketches quickly turned out to be hysterical or even evil. The picture below shows the sketches for the new face of our little guy. Number 1 is a slightly improved version of the old orange face, no. 2 is too restrained, polished, no. 4 is too young and lacks experience. We liked no. 5 the most.

I drew some sketches of facial and body expressions, so that we could imagine his character better.

Once his character was defined, I could think more about tehnical purposes of this guy. His role was to work well as an icon, a logo and a character in the illustrations. He had to be distinct when used small as a favicon, or as a program icon; at the same time, he had to have enough details, so he was interesting and expressive in the illustrations.

Below we see that Orange icon works well at different sizes. I also designed the logotype text Orange data mining to match the little orange guy. I chose non-serif typography Netto Pro Black and Arial Rounded MT Black. Both simple, with rounded edges to match the orange icon.

I also made a short opening and closing animation for Orange’s YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4QhPmWNzP0

I also designed a website for Orange. https://orangedatamining.com