Aero StudioNorthwind
Twenty years of acquisitions had produced eleven logos, four typefaces and an unresolved argument about the company colour.
The situation
Northwind is a regional logistics operator that grew mostly by buying smaller companies. Each acquisition kept its own signage, livery and letterhead, on the reasonable grounds that local customers recognised them. Two decades later this had produced a company where the depot in one city and the depot in the next appeared to be competitors.
The trigger for the project was practical rather than aesthetic: a fleet renewal was coming, and someone had to decide what to paint on 340 vehicles.
What we found
We spent the first three weeks visiting depots and talking to drivers, dispatchers and the two people who had been quietly maintaining the artwork files. Three things came out of it.
First, the local brands mattered far less to customers than head office assumed. Almost everyone we spoke to booked through a freight broker and had no strong feeling about the name on the truck. Second, they mattered a great deal to staff — several depots had strong internal identities built around the old names, and a blunt replacement would have been read as erasure. Third, the practical cost of the fragmentation was enormous and largely invisible: every depot was procuring its own signage, uniforms and vehicle graphics at small-batch prices.
The old marks were not really brands by that point. They were a filing system that had escaped into the physical world.
The approach
We proposed a single identity with a structured endorsement system rather than a clean-sweep replacement. One wordmark, one palette, one typeface — with a defined position where a depot or division name sits, in a consistent style. Local teams kept a visible identity; the company gained a single system.
The wordmark itself is deliberately unremarkable. This is not a business where distinctiveness at the logo level does much work. The recognisable element is the livery: a fixed asymmetric band that works across vehicle sizes from vans to double-trailers, which was the part we spent most of the time on.
Rollout
Everything was phased against existing replacement cycles rather than run as a single launch. Vehicles change as they are renewed, signage as it is replaced, uniforms as they wear out. The full transition runs to 2029. This was the least exciting option available and by a wide margin the cheapest.
We delivered the system as a set of production-ready templates rather than a guidelines document, on the assumption — correct, as it turned out — that a printed manual would sit unopened in a drawer while people continued to email each other logo files.
Outcome
- Eleven marks reduced to one, with a defined system for divisional naming.
- Procurement consolidated: signage and vehicle graphics now bought centrally.
- Livery templates covering nine vehicle types, usable by the fleet supplier without design involvement.
- No depot lost its name.