nlogax
Established Member
Well it looks "right" to me, the font weight looks bang-on.
Looks to me like original RA.
Well it looks "right" to me, the font weight looks bang-on.
Looks more like Ribblehead, that tall.Does the viaduct not represent Castlefield towards Ardwick?
Manchester Airport is anything but pleasant, but unless I want to pay Avanti a small fortune to get to Heathrow, I don't have much choice.
Looks to me like original RA.
Does to me too. RA2 looks a lot more modern.
GBR is a bloody transport service, I'm not going to ask then to redecorate my living room.
Look at it this way, one of your candidates (both clean shaven and equally qualified) has a nice crisp white shirt and the other is an Austin Powers lookalike, who gets the job?
Good grief, I don't know if you're deliberately missing the point or not. I'm not expecting them to go to great lengths producing unique and interesting designs, or to produce a 60s tribute complete with bright colours, I'm just asking them to look like they've made even the slightest bit of effort.
As it is, it just looks like GBR have done nothing more than just fire up word and hammer out station names in the default font. Yes I know that it's a special font, which has been developed to be supremely readable at great cost and effort, but to most of the public it'll just look like "generic sans-serif" and thus entirely 'stock settings'. I'd personally be reasonably content with just a single bar of monochromatic colour along the bottom of the sign, no need to go overboard - just make it look like you've actually thought about it. Even if they have put great thought into it, it doesn't look like it, and gives a bad impression
However in answer to your question, the candidate with the crisp white shirt seems like they'd make a better impression than someone rocking up in a flamboyant suit with frilly shirt and neckerchief, at least for an office role.
Leave the signage as simple as possible to read. Yes stations can look uninviting. So spend the extra on decorating, removing weeds (trees hanging out of walls) and get rid of tagging.Do both. The whole station environment package has to be welcoming, clean and tidy. All the things none of them were in 1980s BR days that people hark back to when supporting this drab, boring signage scheme.
You miss the point.
"The station is clean, tidy and attractive in appearance, that makes me feel safe, happy and comfortable using the train".
Is your house perchance magnolia and off-brown carpets throughout as per the "standard" rental house look? Inoffensive but utterly boring. If so this might explain your view, if not why don't you want stations looking as attractive as your lounge?
I have stopped at Rugby services a few times recently, a brand new site. It is bright and attractive, with clear but colourful signage - I'm sure it wasn't Stenning that did it as he sticks to buses but it's that sort of look. One thing that occurred to me is "why aren't railway station concourses this nice?" Perhaps you'd prefer the drab concrete of Charnock Richard, Watford Gap etc?
Stenning's marketing package for London Midland was an absolute masterpiece, making a boring commuter railway really attractive looking to leisure traffic. LNR's is decidedly amateurish in comparison. All white would just be "right, it's a boring commuter service, Avanti (or your car) is over there".
Why don't Ryanair just paint their planes white as it's cheapest? Because even to a rock-bottom budget operation marketing and branding is really important.
The signs do not bother me - I just want to read and comprehend them. What screams we cannot be bothered about are appearance is the weeds growing out of brickwork and the miles and miles of tagging.The actual reason that books tend to be black and white is because it's cheap and quick with just the one ink, one set of printing equipment, 1/4 the print time of a full CYMK print etc. On the scale of a book publisher, saving that time and money absolutely makes sense. On something like this re-branding where you're printing on the order of 50,000 pieces of signage (~2500 stations, 20 signs on average per station) with a shelf life of at least a decade, you can stomach the additional production cost and time of adding a small amount of colour (especially if you just add the one colour) to make the sign less utterly drab.
A plain white sign with text on screams "we can't be arsed" - which is not really the sort of image that you want to project.
YES.It's a bloody station sign for goodness sake, with the advent of GBR there is no need for branding. If I'm stood at station "A" I'm unlikely to walk to station "B" because their signs are "nicer".
Easy to read is the priority and that ties-in nicely with cheapest to produce, end of story.
Yes.GBR is a bloody transport service, I'm not going to ask then to redecorate my living room.
Look at it this way, one of your candidates (both clean shaven and equally qualified) has a nice crisp white shirt and the other is an Austin Powers lookalike, who gets the job?
Well I have been on a few trips recently.You might not, but most people have a car available to them and it doesn't take much for them to switch to it.
Does to me too. RA2 looks a lot more modern.
Bit of an aside but I have a problem with Bi-lingual signs. It slows me down a lot. I have missed a lot of road signs in Wales. So A different colour font or surround for each language might help me to ignore the language I cannot read. That is where colour has a use - to help inform not to embellish.Exactly.
TfW have done this - the same sort of thing with the text in RA2 and the BR sign in the bottom right would look great. Not overpowering, but like some thought has gone into it.
Wrexham General station sign in TfW style, credit George Jones on Charlie Hulme's site nwrail.org.uk
Yes, true, but offices of that nature are deliberately boring, as that is the culture that they are aiming to create - you want process-following drones. Office environments requiring creativity such as tech startups tend to think very differently about dress and decoration.
Bit of an aside but I have a problem with Bi-lingual signs. It slows me down a lot. I have missed a lot of road signs in Wales. So A different colour font or surround for each language might help me to ignore the language I cannot read. That is where colour has a use - to help inform not to embellish.
When I'm hiring for office-based roles I wouldn't say I differentiate based on what people are wearing or stubble very much at all.However in answer to your question, the candidate with the crisp white shirt seems like they'd make a better impression than someone rocking up in a flamboyant suit with frilly shirt and neckerchief, at least for an office role.
Exactly, it's a marketing faux-pas. If it looks rubbish, people will think it is rubbish. And one thing 1980s BR with its mucky white signage and drab blue and grey trains looked was rubbish. It's amazing just how basic and poorly looked after it was compared with today, though to be fair that's also true of most areas of life.
Even Regional Railways days were a bit drab. If you can find a copy, watch Victoria Wood's Great Railway Journey - the whole thing was just depressing, a railway in decline doing the bare minimum it could be bothered to do, and a British holiday industry in its death throes. So different to today despite low-cost airlines being something that emerged rather later than it was filmed.
How many branches of ASDA still have Associated Dairies branding in full view?
I get that private companies want to portray an image and grow. But this is the railways. All these private comapanies were making a profit out of the subsidy they received from the government.I think this is something some people didn't realise/appreciate when private companies took over. Private companies need to make money, and to make money isn't just about doing the bare minimum and cutting everything to the bone.. you need to invest to grow a business, which then makes you more money.
Coming up with new brands, more innovative promotions and so on can make people want to travel more. Whatever we think of Virgin, they knew how to market themselves. I certainly can't see the DfT wanting or caring about stuff like this, which could be a real problem.
Yes that is correct and worse still that expensive support was even being lavished on the railways when indulgent signs were the norm !.Whilst I can fully understand what's being said about branding, one thing that most certainly needs to be considered is that GBR will be very heavily funded to the tune on several £B by the taxpayer - somewhat unlike a successful brand. Customer perception is very much part of branding - as has been shown by many of the posts on this subject. Will GBR want to risk creating a brand that may well appear indulgent or excessive to their benefactors? Or will they want to appear to be being conscious of the support they are receiving from the taxpayer and therefore financially prudent?
Stations signages primary purpose is wayfinding, helping people find out where they need to go and to find the facilities and services they need. It needs to be simple to use and easy to read, that has to be the main purpose of anything that is provided.
How many branches of ASDA still have Associated Dairies branding in full view?
I read that and thought their method was very suspect. They smudged/blurred backgrounds to a kind of average colour and then tested against that. So it would inevitably not be white or lettered and so white would stand out.I feel a lot of people miss the context of why white was chosen as the base colour. A dark colour was an option but after being tested it was determined to blend into the surroundings too much, so they needed one that contrasted with it better and it was either white, or neon colours that did that.
Have you not heard of the "British Restaurant"?Makes me think if the government took over Tesco, Sainsburys and ASDA and just had a big white sign saying “SHOP” on the front. It’s awful.
I read that and thought their method was very suspect. They smudged/blurred backgrounds to a kind of average colour and then tested against that. So it would inevitably not be white or lettered and so white would stand out.
In the real world you will have black letters on white where there are loads of examples of black lettering on white. The important bit is not to stand out against a wall as a sign, but to stand out against all the other signs and adverts. Which means brand coloured backrounds such as Southern or SWR (which were clearly station signs) or at least have a brand coloured outline.
Are there bits of Wales that have started receiving GBR branding? I thought it was all TfW going up.Honestly, who cares if a crap system is forced to use a particular font or a brand? They might actually prefer to hide their **** behind an 'England and bits of Wales but definitely not Scotland or Northern Ireland pretending it's British' idenity
Although I still think that the 1965 British Rail corporate identity and design manual were two of Dr Beeching's greatest legacies it is hard to say that they really 'worked'. Passenger usage remained very subdued through to the the 1980s. Growth only really became evident once the Sectors (and PTEs) started a collection of more assertive branding strategies.If the basic black text on white background worked back in the day then it can still work now.
Edale-Grindleford (at least) now have GBR signage. As does Chester-le-Street.
I've only really seen it at Northern stations, is there a reason for that?
Edale-Grindleford (at least) now have GBR signage. As does Chester-le-Street.
I've only really seen it at Northern stations, is there a reason for that?