Double Coin Imaging Awards

It's a livery that keeps company branding to a bare minimum: No big, bold logo on the roof aerofoil. Ditto for the stock crates.

And yet in the area that G.K. Skou Transport concentrates on – primarily around the Manawatu, and most particularly around its base in Marton – its trucks are unmistakable.

That's thanks to their readily-identifiable bold colours – dark green, dramatically cut by bright red and yellow stripes.

Sure, the same colours also used to feature on the big Total Transport fleet just up the island at Taupo, company founder Graeme Skou acknowledges.

In fact, on the 1985 Mack Cruise-Liner classic he restored eight years ago, he actually replicated the Total livery rather than the G.K. Skou Transport colour scheme (with the style of the stripes and heaps of extra pinstriping).

The stripes on the Skou trucks have always been different to the old Total livery – from the time when he started the company, in 1986.

The yellow stripe on top, the red below, ran straight across the front of his trucks below the windscreen, back under the side windows and flicked up the side of the cab behind the windows. In some cases, the stripes even returned forward, above the side windows. And a broad red stripe continued back, on the stock crates.

"Now, with Total not around…there's nothing really like it eh, which is quite cool."

Apart from modifications to suit different truck makes and models, the Skou colour scheme has essentially had only one change over the years.

That was in 1994: "There was an old fella Pat Culling – used to have Culling Enterprises, a truck painting business in Palmerston North.

"And he said to me one day, when he went to paint one of the trucks: 'I'm sick of you with all these colours! Why don't you just have a straight green, with a couple of stripes through it.'

"What he was getting at was we had a silver bumper, white roof…a bit of white around the windows as well!"

Culling's tidy-up – getting rid of the silver and the white – worked a treat as far as Graeme's concerned: "We've had it ever since….stuck to that. It just seems to have grown on you eh. I'm very happy with the colour scheme."

He and current signwriter, Tony Walton's Custom Art in Feilding, have added pin-striping to the livery in recent years – around the doors and windows and across the front of the trucks: "It lifts them a little bit too eh," says Graeme approvingly.

He'd almost forgotten another change – the short-term adoption of signwriting and deer's head graphics on the aerofoil, back in the early 2000s. They disappeared from the livery purely by chance...