CIE - The Irish Transport Authority
CIE Group, Ireland's public transport authority, made the repositioning
of public transport a key issue in the strategic plan to create a more
integrated system and better experience for the customer. Identifying
brand communications as the single most powerful tool in achieving
their goal, Pat McDonagh, the Head of Corporate Communications at CIE
commissioned me to create a consolidated, customer-friendly public
transit image. I had worked previously with Pat when he was the
Kerrygold brand manager at the Irish Dairy board cleaning up and
modernizing the Kerrygold butter brand.
My
challenge was to undo the previous ten years of brand fragmentation
where the operating companies that make up the CIE Group had moved away
from the holding company brand and developed unique identities of their
own. The first step was to modernize the CIE symbol (right). Public
opinion about public transport had grown increasingly negative over the
decades and in particular in the 1980's and early 1990's when the Irish
government just had no money to invest in improving the public's
experience of transit. So the newly won European funding provided a
unique opportunity to create greater integration between the bus, rail
and light rail systems operating around the country, with the goal of
creating a truly seamless journey and a lasting legacy of design
thinking for the future.
In
the new identity, uniform elements of color, type and symbol join all
the public transport services within the national system. The city bus
systems, light rail, national bus and heavy rail services all
communicate to the customer in a single tone of voice, making it a
simple and inviting system for the passenger to use. All CIE
communication vehicles were re-designed including passenger
information, vehicle livery, Website, financial communications such as
the annual reports (left), and in particular the station signage for over 100 train and light rail stations around the country.
I provided detailed specifications to the group architects to implement the new signage (right). Because the Irish government actively preserve the Irish language, all station signs appear in both Irish and English.
This is one of the most unique aspects to the CIE Group Identity. I realized early on in the project that the best way to solve the problem of the two languages and a great way to unify all the operating companies in a subtle way was to design a custom typeface. The result was Ireland's first custom corporate typeface, CIE 2000. My old friend and long-time creative partner Tony Fahy provided the guiding hand for this important aspect of the project.
The
new typeface brings in a common tone of voice across the group, so that
when passengers were making the change from one transport system to
another, the thread of communication remains unbroken. Take a look at
the range of signs shown here all using the CIE 2000 typeface.Finally, I designed and wrote and extensive series of brand guides, eight booklets in all. The guidelines cover applications of every element within the brand identity and in particular, the use of the global symbol for interchange: the CIE Group Sunwheel.
