The Ellen is a wooden ferry built in 1961. She carries forty passengers and six bicycles on a twenty-minute crossing between two small islands south of Funen, four times a day in summer and twice in winter. Last year a cooperative of islanders bought her from the municipality for one krone and a promise to keep her running. They asked us for a livery, a timetable and a sign for the jetty. None of us had ever painted a boat, and the budget allowed for exactly one attempt.

colour on water

The first lesson arrived before the paint did. We had chosen a sea green for the hull, tested on screen and on card in the Copenhagen studio, and it was lovely. We took a painted board to the harbour, held it up against the water at about two hundred metres, and it turned grey. Water reflects the sky, and a Danish sky is mostly white. Any colour with too much blue in it disappears into the view.

We went back out with boards six times. The final green is warmer and darker than anything we would have picked indoors, closer to a wine bottle than to the sea. From the jetty it reads clearly against the water in every kind of weather we could find between March and May, which in Denmark is most kinds.

materials that fight back

Marine paint behaves like no other paint we have specified. It is thick, it smells for days and it has strong opinions about temperature. The yard would only apply it above eight degrees with humidity under eighty per cent, which gave us eleven usable days in April. We had drawn the ferry’s name in a narrow serif with fine hairlines. The painter, who has lettered boats in that yard since 1987, looked at the drawing and gave the hairlines one winter. We redrew the letters that afternoon, with heavier strokes he could cut in with a brush.

The painter looked at our hairlines and gave them one winter. We redrew the name that afternoon.

the timetable

The timetable had to work on a laminated sheet cable-tied to a railing, in rain, read by someone holding a bicycle. We set the departure times at 36 point in a single weight, with the island names in capitals above each column, and dropped everything else. It uses one colour, the same green as the hull, and it fits on a sheet of A4.

The sign for the jetty was the simplest part and took the longest. It is a single board of oiled larch with the ferry’s name and the words ‘next crossing’ above a slot for a hand-painted card, which the skipper changes each morning. The cooperative asked for a digital screen. We asked them to try the cards for one summer. They have kept them, partly because the skipper enjoys choosing which card to use.

what we took home

No identity project has taught us as much about distance and weather. Most brand guidelines are written for a screen and a printed page at arm’s length. The Ellen taught us to test a colour at the distance it will actually be seen, in the light it will actually be seen in. She is a small boat, and she changed how we check every colour we choose.