Moving Type

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.