The MHD Partnership has turned to a familiar colour for this imagined relaunch of the main company serving the streets of Scotland’s largest city, even if in its day that colour was called something else
IDENTITY PARADE
From a branding perspective, Strathclyde’s Buses was the easyJet of its day — it would transport you around the city of Glasgow in any colour, as long as it was orange. And if there is one thing that easyJet is known for, it is its distinctive and memorable branding.
Did we dare say orange? In a city where orange is not just a colour but can also be a statement of tribal allegiance to one side of a sectarian divide, the official name of the colour applied to Glasgow’s buses was ‘Strathclyde red’. This was red as in the colour of ginger hair or the sandstone from which many of its buildings were made, but yes it really was orange, if not in name.
Orange and black had become the livery of Strathclyde PTE in 1983, replacing green and yellow colour combinations that also were tribally significant, and it remained largely unaltered with the creation of the arms length Strathclyde’s Buses three years later. It survived the company’s sale to a management/employee buyout in which Stagecoach too…
