It was a typical evening drive home from work when I noticed large capital letters in my parallel vision. At first I told myself, “man I gotta lay off the fonts, I’m starting to see things.” Bad joke I know, but I took a second look just to make sure, and sure enough there were huge letters traveling on the bi-way a few hundred feet from me.
These letters belonged to a logo, which belonged to a truck, which belonged to a company named Roadway. In fact that is pretty much how I interpreted what I was seeing. Seeing these commanding letters travel next to me for about a minute made me realize that this was such a great implementation of type.
Even before I noticed the truck, my eye was attracted to the large letter forms, no doubt because that was the intention of whoever designed this logo application. From viewing that experience, I was left with the feeling that Roadway was an authoritative freight carrier.
When I arrived home I did some brief research and came across the Roadway website. To my chagrin, I saw that they had re-aligned their brand appearance. The look still maintained some of the original Roadway qualities but was not the experience I was left with just a few moments ago. It seems they left the orange by the wayside and took the dark blue into a monochromatic color scheme. Also, the logo was changed to lowercase type accompanied by a catchy tagline.
- Original Roadway Logo
- New Roadway Logo
Why did the company make these changes?
Is it to visually compete with the likes of FedEx and other companies? Possibly, or maybe Roadway wanted to portray a more approachable, friendly appearance. I may never know, but I do know that I preferred the former Roadway iconography because it was different. Now Roadway appears too similar to the FedEx logotype, which in my opinion decreases their ability to differentiate from their competition.
Maybe I am just bitter that those great capital letters will no longer grace the streets. I will not be able to see them traveling on an occasional road trip anymore, and I feel sorry for all those great trailers that will slowly but surely be replaced with a new face.
- Design
- 3/25/2007
- 10:00 pm
3 Responses to “Moving Type”
henry – June 12th, 2007
sometimes it important to pause and think for a while, whether to follow or make your own way.
nice article there:)
Dan – September 17th, 2007
that picture reminded me of the final scene in the movie Heat; dunno why.
Stephen Williams – January 16th, 2008
Dan, your retarded.