Orange Bench

Orange Bench is a benchmark for logo colours. It asks how alike the startup oranges really are, and whether you can tell them apart.

It started with my own launch video. One scene lines this site's new orange up against Y Combinator, CodeRabbit, Corgi and Melius, then calls it a completely original orange. Scroll X for long enough and the orange avatars blur into one square, so I wanted a real answer. Four was not enough, so Product Hunt, Zapier, Postman, Strava and Cloudflare joined the bench.

Below are the ten oranges, a leaderboard of every pair, a map of where each one sits, a test for your own eyes, and a dropper to bench your own logo.

The Lineup

Y Combinator, CodeRabbit, Corgi and Melius are sampled straight from their avatars on X. The other five are the colours each brand publishes. This site's orange sits in as the control.

Leaderboard

Forty five pairs, ranked from most alike to least. The score is Delta E 2000, the standard measure of how different two colours look to a person. Under 1, nobody can see it. Past 5, they read as two different colours. Tap any pair to see the two side by side.

Switch the ranking to RGB distance, the straight line between two colours in screen values, and the board reshuffles. RGB puts Y Combinator right next to Melius. Your eyes put it next to CodeRabbit. Change the metric, change the leaderboard.

The Map

Every orange by hue and lightness. Three groups show up. Y Combinator, CodeRabbit, Corgi, Zapier and Strava crowd together, with Postman a step lighter. Melius, Product Hunt and this site sit darker and redder. Cloudflare is off on its own, far yellower than anyone else.

Results

Zapier and Strava are the closest pair on the bench at 0.96. That's under 1, so nobody can see the difference. Two brands, one orange.

CodeRabbit sits at the centre of the crowd: 1.34 from Zapier, 1.66 from Corgi and 2.17 from Strava.

Average the nine startups and you get #F65C18. Call it startup orange. Y Combinator lands closest to it at 1.21, which makes the accelerator the most startup orange of them all.

Cloudflare is the outlier. Its nearest neighbour is Corgi at 9.41, which still reads as two different colours. It's the one startup here with an orange of its own.

And this site? It's the darkest of the ten, and its nearest neighbour is Product Hunt at 2.84. A completely original orange, unless you put it next to Product Hunt.

Your Turn

Ten rounds, each a random pair from the bench. Two squares share an orange and one doesn't. Pick the odd one out. Turn your brightness up first, because screens differ and so do eyes.

Your Logo

Got an orange of your own? Drop in a PNG of your logo, tap its colour with the dropper, and see how it scores against every orange on the bench. Your logo never leaves your browser.

Method

Y Combinator, CodeRabbit, Corgi and Melius are the most common pixel in each company's X avatar, sampled from a screenshot in sRGB in October 2026. X compresses avatars, so treat those as the oranges you see in the feed. Product Hunt, Zapier, Postman, Strava and Cloudflare are the colours each brand publishes.

Differences are CIEDE2000 under the D65 white point, checked against Sharma, Wu and Dalal's published test data. The verdicts are a rule of thumb from Mokrzycki and Tatol's survey of colour difference. They were written for an older formula, so treat the edges as soft.

RGB distance is the straight line between two colours in red, green and blue, as a share of the distance from black to white. The map uses OKLCH, a colour space built so that equal steps look roughly equal.

Your logo's score turns Delta E into a match: 100% is the same colour, 80% is Delta E 5, where two colours stop reading as one, and 50% is Delta E 10. The dropper reads the exact pixel you tap.

Nine startups so far. Know another colour everyone seems to share? Send it my way and it goes on the bench.