There was a try at freshening the livery, but it didn't look all that great. The new white GBS based livery could work very nicely.
I didn't mind the update to the livery shown as it was an attempt to be modern and an improvement over the plain stripe previously used, but the biggest issue from my point of view is the insipid light blue. Whatever is done, using a light blue base with a less than highly contrasting dark blue is always going to be less than appealing. Every other operator seems to have done away with a base colour other than white, presumably for reasons of easy repair, but it has the advantage that, if kept clean, it looks modern with a sympathetic set of vinyls and colours and styles. Even Ventura on some of their coaches adopted a white base and blue / light blue / yellow variant that looks really good - shame it never made it to their route buses as it would have been a great improvement.
What, the actual red and the almost pink?
Red has been an issue with fast discolouration for a long time - something to do with the pigments used and their reaction to sunlight or some such thing. As an aside, anyone with access to the Keith Parkin book on British Railways Mk I coaches can read some interesting information on the issue IIRC. Blue should be less problematic in this regard.
I doubt this livery will make it over to the Ventura side as there is too much history behind the existing livery, as most know Ventura as the blue bus company. Anyway only new or major repair buses get the blue livery.
The trick will be to modify their livery to be sympathetic to their history. Dysons was a great example of this modifying their two tone green livery to a rather striking white top half, dark green lower half and pale green stripes. It was recognisable still as a Dysons bus, even including their compass logo, but modernised. Even the later liveries of the plain white and stripes and the current pick up sticks livery can be traced back to the company colours from those days - nobody would be silly enough to suggest that people can no longer pick that the bus in the distance is owned / operated by Dysons.
Equally there is no reason Ventura can't do the same - in fact as I have already mentioned for some of their coaches they did just this - and it looks good.
Im not certain to be honest, but my gut feeling tells me that seeing as this bus has been labelled "Dandenong" that other depots buses will have the suburb they are based in as being their label. It would appear all buses will probably have the Ventura name on them, but will be labelled according to their depots location. This might also allow passengers in certain cases to quickly accertain which depot the bus they left their wallet on comes from, as its merrily driving off, on routes where multiple depots operate, e.g. The 828 Berwick-Hampton route.
Gut feeling suggests that given current Grenda practice does something similar, that the suburb name will probably only appear on Grenda versions for now. However, it is really a clever idea and I think it should be rolled out across the board. I wonder if they realised how clever it was when they did it, or whether it was an accident that will become more obvious over time...
Will be interesting to see what happens with the Smartbus livery and how it will be modified/ Ventura-ed if this is the direction they are taking. Hopefully better than the current disjointed approach.
The red stripe should have been left, as that looks terrible now! 
