It was only in the late 1960s that the Liberal Party started to campaign across the country using the colour orange. Prior to that the colour used locally tended to depend on the political history of the area and could be green, blue, red, yellow or orange. Dayglo orange is actually quite red, so the party tried to standardize on “Blaze” which is a bit more orange. The new wave of activists who joined the party in the late sixties and early seventies, many of whom were campaigning for the first time in decades in the major cities, favoured arc chrome rather than blaze which they saw as being too close to Labour Party red. The now ubiquitous diamond shaped poster measuring 10″ x 10″, because dayglo came in double crown sheets (20″ x 30″) and so cut six out of a sheet with no wasteage began to gain a foothold at that time too.
When the SDP emerged on the scene in 1981 they decided that their posters had to be different from the Liberal Partyʼs, and so they got Slater Harrison to produce a new colour of dayglo called “Amber Soleil”, which was a sort of mustard yellow and looked very half-heartedly fluorescent. For years after the merger of the Liberal Party and the SDP some diehards used to ask us for samples of non-fluorescent paper in an attempt to emulate amber soleil, which was not added to Slater Harrisonʼs dayglo range.