The 20th anniversary silverorange art project
We asked some of our friends and members of our team to create pieces of visual art to help celebrate the 20th anniversary of silverorange. The response was delightful. We first showed these pieces at the 20th anniversary party and we will be framing them for permanent display at the silverorange offices in Charlottetown. Thanks to all who participated.
Daniel Burka
NEW YORK/LONDON — Daniel is one of the original founders of silverorange and helped lead our design efforts for years. While he went on to work at Digg, TinySpeck, Milk, GV (née Google Ventures), and now Resolve to Save Lives, Daniel is still a co-owner and active advisor to silverorange. While Daniel has lived in San Francisco, New York, Bangalore, and is now setting up in London, he always makes it back to Atlantic Canada for our annual company retreat.
This glassy 3D slice sketch was from a set of experiments Daniel kicked off a few years ago, exploring how we could evolve the visual identity and logo of silverorange. We’ve opted to stick with our classic slice logo for now — it too was a Daniel Burka creation — drawn in Corel Draw back in 1999.
Geoff Gibson
OTTAWA, ONTARIO — Geoff Gibson is a close friend to many of us at silverorange. He worked with us for a little over a year, joining when the company was only a few months old. Geoff now works as a designer for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in Ottawa and creates visual art of his own. Geoff started with a list of memories and ideas he associates with silverorange. His list includes: Weekly BBQ, hikes all over the world (primarily California sequoias), , building (houses, crafts, websites, etc), healthcare, music, awards, frisbee golf, coffee, PEI, family, among many others. The border around the outside is a nod to the intricate wooden gingerbread decoration on our Charlottetown office.
Tom Hughes
SCITUATE, MASSACHUSETTS — Tom Hughes is a close friend and something of a company godfather. Tom served as the creative director at Apple, Polaroid, and idealLab! and has been a generous friend and mentor to many of us at silverorange. Tom created this remarkable oil painting with an actual orange posing as a model. It will hang in our office as a reminder of Tom’s friendship and kindness.
Tom also took a series of photos of Boston transit system and composed them into this mythical meeting of the silver and orange lines. If you look closely, there’s a slice in there.
Kendra Kohler
GIBSONS, BRITISH COLUMBIA — Kendra joined silverorange as a developer in 2018 and works from her home in Gibsons, British Columbia (the Beachcombers town!). She designed and crafted this custom cross-stitch for our 20th anniversary, but it’s not her first cross stitch for silverorange. During her first month, she made this beautiful cross-stitch slice that hangs in our office kitchen in Charlottetown.
Steven Garrity
CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND — I’m one of the original founders of silverorange and the company’s Creative Director. While I’ve got 20 years of experience with visual design, I don’t have strong illustration skills. I’m happy to dive into help a client improve the visual design and experience of a website, but give me a blank canvas and I freeze up.
I worked around these limitations by deconstructing our slice logo. I broke it down into simple geometric shapes and reconstituted them as a sun setting over a mountain horizon. The mountains are the two tips of the slice logo, the objects in the sky, and the sun itself, are from the dots on the peel of the slice logo.
Nikki Babaii
CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND — Nikki Babaii spent the summer of 2019 with us as part of the UPEI co-op program. Nikki recast the iconic Scotch VHS cassette design with silverorange themes and impressive fidelity.
Stephen DesRoches
CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND — Stephen DesRoches joined as one of our earliest employees when the company was three-years old back in 2002. He works from our Charlottetown office as one of our lead designers and is also a talented photographer with a book coming out this year.
Stephen ambitiously took an actual slice of a real fresh orange and painted it in the style of our logo. While he shared this with us as an experiment, it was an immediate favourite given the rich effect of the mixture of paint and actual orange juice.
Stephen also created this minimal slice silhouette. It was created as a possible sticker for the back of Apple laptops back when the Apple logo was back-lit. It may crop up in our branding again as it’s such an effective rendering of the shape of the slice with so few visual elements.
Sean Martell
NOVA SCOTIA — Sean Martell is the creative lead at Mozilla who worked for years in Toronto before returning to work from his home province of Nova Scotia. We had the pleasure of working with Sean during our collaboration on early Firefox branding and went on to refine the Firefox logo over several generations. Sean was generous with his talents and responded to our request within hours with his combination of the Firefox and silverorange logos.
Nick Burka
MONTREAL, QUEBEC — Nick is a founding partner at silverorange and works as one of our lead developers from his home in Montreal, Quebec. With masters in art history, Nick brings a unique background to this project. He was inspired by the collage works of the German artist Hannah Höch and created this collage as a physical piece, before capturing it with a digital camera and finishing it off in Photoshop. It’s full of visual easter-eggs and company history, but we suspect it was mostly an elaborate ruse to be able to put his own face on the canvas.
Nick also used this project as the impetus to update this set of avatars of the team at silverorange based on Pablo Stanley’s delightful avataaars library. You can create your own with the web editor.
Thank you all!
Thanks to all of the artists who participated in our project. It was fun to reconnect and I’m looking forward to having the pieces framed to hang in our office as we begin our third decade.
silverorange designs and develops simple and powerful web and mobile applications. We’ve worked with clients including Mozilla, Hippo Education, EM:RAP, TinEye, CourseHost, and Duolingo. Read more on our blog or follow us on Twitter.
