RIDE

RIDE: Detroit's Metropolitan
Transit Authority

This was a group project to create branding and promotional Matererials for the Lower
East Side Pickle Day 2017 Art Direction: Nina LoSchiavo Design: Jim Tierney and Nina LoSchiavo
Illustrations: Leo Natsume Promotional Ads and Animation: Julian Rucker

What is RIDE?

RIDE, is a mult-transit brand compiled of Metro Detroit transportation systems, DDOT (Detroit Department of Transportation), SMART (Suburban Mobility Authority for Regional Transportation), the M-1 Rail, the MiTrain, and the People Mover. That's the serious, white collar explanation. We, at RIDE, really just want to have fun and want our customers to have fun as well. When you want to plan a trip from Ann Arbor to Midtown Detroit, we want to make sure you recognize our vibrant, multi-colored transportation authority and feel, well, comfortable enough to trust that we will get you to your destination safely, with a smile.

Essence

Clean, customer - focused, safe and secure public transit services

Promise

Providing Public transit services for everyone in Metro Detroit. WIth several different types of services to help
you connect to school, or to wherever you need to be

Mark

What is the meaning of the mark?

Providing Public transit services for everyone in Metro Detroit. WIth several different types of services to help you connect to school, or to wherever you need to be

How did you come up
with the mark?

Well, when you're looking for something happy and welcoming, what's better than a smile? Smiles can make someone days better or make their day in general, so it was a very specific gesture that we wanted to focus on when creating the branding for this integrated transit system. So, what about the smile?

Is that a smile?

The extended, curved descender of the "R", the actual smile, resonates with the happiness and friendliness of the brand. It's placement, with the "I" sitting directly in the dip, representative of a nose, and ending at the start of the "D", which is representative of a right eye, forms not only a smile, but a complete happy face. It is truly open to the customer's interpretation as to what they see in the mark or how they feel about it, but the mark does give off extremely positive vibes.

Colors

Color as Brand Identifier

The color palette for RIDE is comprised of six eye popping colors meant to reinforce the friendly, energetic nature of the brand. Five colors are specifically used to represent an individual brand, with one universal brand specific color. Having each transportation brand represented with their own color, typically incorporated with white, allows the user to easily identify each particular brand within the RIDE umbrella. Plus, they just look happy,

let's be honest. The exact colors of the brand are: Lime Green; #45c3d3; C: 57 M: 0 Y: 99 K: 0; R: 122 G: 193 B: 66 Magenta; #ee2375; C: 0 M: 96 Y:25 K:0; R: 238 G: 35 B: 117 Orange; #f68e33; C: 0 M: 53 Y: 90 K: 0; R: 246 G: 142 B: 51 Purple; #7f3f98; C: 59 M: 90 Y: 0 K: 0; R: 127 G: 63 B: 152 Baby Blue; #45c3d3; C: 63 M: 0 Y:18 K:0; R: 69 G: 195 B: 211

Type

What is the brand typeface and why was it chosen

The typeface used in the RIDE brand is ASAP. The typeface is a rounded sans-serif which is made up of 4 different weights, including: regular, bold, italic and bold italic.
ASAP was the chosen typeface because of its friendly rounded characters that also maintain a high readability. The typeface ASAP also means "As Soon As Possible" which is appropriate for the brand being in the public transportation business. The bold weight will be used for headlines and featured type hierarchy as it has the darkest typographic color of all of the weights.

Symbols

Use of brand symbols?

The brand uses customized icons to help identify each form of transportation, one of the things we identified in our research was the importance of using symbols as opposed to text in order for information to be understood quickly and easily. The symbols will be used mostly in signage to allow a user to recognize that it is a stop for ride and which form of transportation that the stop is for. They also look very bubbly and cartoonish, which is what, fun! Now you're getting it.

Applications

That's all good in theory but how is it applied?

The applications used in the Ride brand consist of: a mobile application, website, social media, maps, bus wraps, train wraps, stations/pick up locations, signage, motion graphics, clothing/uniforms, stickers and duffel bags. The applications serve a variety of purposes ranging from advertisements for the brand to route planning and route identification. The wide variety of applications makes the brand more visible and identifiable in Detroit's environment and media outlets.