An identity that had to work on a truck

An identity for a logistics operator running nine vehicle types, from motorcycles to articulated trucks, across a country where the same lorry is seen at forty metres in dust and at two metres in a depot.

The livery is the identity, not an application of it

Most identities are designed on a screen and put on a truck afterwards. The logo is finished, the palette is signed off, and then somebody discovers that the wordmark is unreadable at speed and the secondary colour disappears completely under sodium lighting.

We reversed it. The first test was a printed wordmark on board, carried to the far end of the yard, at forty metres, in the middle of the afternoon. Three candidate marks went out; one came back. The letterforms that survived are wider and more open than the version that looked best on a laptop, and that is the whole argument.

A logistics brand is seen more often by people who never deal with the company than by people who do. The livery is the advertising.

Nine vehicle types, one system

A livery that works on a forty foot trailer does not scale down to a motorcycle top box; it just gets smaller until it is a smudge. So the system is three sizes rather than one artwork: full, where the wordmark and the stripe both fit; reduced, where the stripe is dropped; and minimum, where only the mark survives.

Every vehicle type has a template with the positions marked in millimetres from a fixed datum, so a wrapper in Chattogram produces the same vehicle as a wrapper in Dhaka without either of them making a judgement call.

The palette is proportional

Four colours, and the guideline says what share of the artwork each one takes. Paper is more than half of every document. Haulage Blue carries the livery and the headings. Dock Grey is body copy. Signal Amber is five percent, reserved for warnings and one accent, and specified that way because an amber used at thirty percent stops meaning "warning" within a month.

It is specified in Pantone for print, RAL for vehicle paint and vinyl, and RGB for screen. Those are three different systems that do not convert cleanly, and a guideline that gives only one of them is a guideline that will be guessed at.

What was handed over

A forty page document with the vehicle templates, the three lockup sizes, the colour references in all three systems, and the two typefaces with the weights each one is licensed for. It is written to be used by a signwriter, not admired by a designer.