Every creative has had that moment when you're staring at a blank page, waiting for inspiration to hit. When it comes to designing a brand identity, though, you don't really have any excuse. You just have to put in the right level of research into the client or project, and you'll soon find what you're looking for.
That's exactly what creative agency hasan & partners did when they were approached by Train Factory, a new food, drink, sport and culture destination built inside a historic locomotive manufacturing site in Finland's capital, Helsinki.
The site was once central to Finnish rail manufacturing; a place where the majority of the country's locomotives were built. That's a lot of history to carry, and some designers might have leaned on it too literally. Happily, the studio instead went the extra mile, and set out to look for something more specific.
Inspiration strikes
The essence of a place is often found in the small details, and so it proved here. Inspiration struck in the form of a small, unglamorous piece of industrial signage: a graphic used on the sides of train cars to indicate where the vehicle could be safely lifted during maintenance.
It's the kind of symbol most of us would walk past a thousand times without registering. But for this rebranding project, it turned out to be the perfect foundation. They repurposed and redesigned this utilitarian mark into the brand's primary 'T' logo.
It's a lovely bit of lateral thinking: a symbol whose entire purpose was mechanical and instructional, telling a crane operator exactly where to attach a hook, becomes the symbol of an entirely new kind of elevation: elevating a disused industrial site into a vibrant, bustling place for people to gather together for fun and friendship.
Why this matters
There's been a lot written in the last few years about the declining use of minimalist, geometric, sans-serif logos. Some of this by yours truly. And I certainly think that the tech world definitely has taken a design style that had a lot to offer and wrung it dry, by repeating it unvaryingly, across seeming every logo and redesign known to man.
But that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with using clean, minimalist, geometric sans-serif typography in general. It's just a question of doing it unthinkingly, simply because it's "on trend", rather than using it because it's the right choice for the story you're telling.
That's why this case study is such a great example of how to do utilitarianism right. This sans-serif wasn't picked off a shelf because it was what everyone else is doing. It evolved organically out of a graphic stencilled on train cars, and it carries the weight of that history in every squared-off letterform.
In short, clean, minimalist sans-serif typography isn't dead, and nor should it be. It just needs a reason to exist. And in the case of The Train Factory, hasan & partners gave it one.
