Australian INfront

Public Transport, in Melbourne, is in free fall despite a recent flurry of announcements and swapping of contracts. There is simply not enough of it, although there seems to be more than enough entities running it. The state government’s recent commitment to public transport has been tentative to say the least. That’s not to say there isn’t oodles of documentation, consultation, plans, schemes and hot air surrounding it. There is activity. Most of it seems to be there to cloak a lack of innovation and real interest in getting Melburnians out of their cars and hitting the streets.

Getting Melburnians out of their cars is a good thing. The lack of a comprehensive public transport network has meant town centres have been replaced with shopping centres and high streets previously teaming with life, now struggle to attract tenants. It has hollowed out the centre of the city. Melbourne’s vast suburbs have become ghost towns where people refuse to walk anywhere that doesn’t come with air conditioning as standard.

This is where having a cohesive visual identity for the public transport network that speaks of clarity with authority would help enormously. Various cities benefit from cohesive visual identities that go a long way to mask the inner turmoil that dogs privately owned companies running public services. Logic dictates that people don’t care who’s running their services as long as they run well. In opposition to this, the privatised world is heavily fragmented and each segment feels pressure to promote themselves even though they usually operate as a monopoly. This means you get useless ad campaigns promoting ticketing systems or individual train lines. The money wasted on these weird and unnecessary campaigns is protest enough.

On their own the selection of logos jostling for attention on Melbourne’s transport network aren’t terrible. It’s when you consider that each of these entities has their own marketing led agenda which includes livery, signage, posters, uniforms, brochures, maps, street furniture etc etc things start to pile up. The visual pollution can be mind boggling. Any number of these entities will appear with each other in any number of configurations, telling you all manner of information about your one singular journey. It’s no wonder people are put off travelling on a system that for all intents and purposes seems to be in the midst of a massive massive identity crisis.

A commentator on my blog mentioned an something about a colour spectrum that Melbourne's transport company identities must fall within to denote various services, i.e. Trains are blue (the new Metro identity is also mostly blue), Trams are green (Yarra Trams are mostly green) and Buses are Purple (er…). The controversial and very costly new myki ticketing system is in acidic shades of both blue and green. The barrage of typefaces and graphic forms manage to camouflage this idea though and makes you wonder why they would be so prescriptive in one aspect and not in producing an coherent and over arching identity for the whole system.

It may seem weird for a designer to be complaining about there being too many new identity projects around but I like to think that, if you have to generalise about these things, graphic designers are highly rational characters, driven by instinct and logic. Part of our job description is to make sense out of chaos and present aspects of the world in as easily digestible way as possible. And, logically, there doesn't seem to be any clear benefit, or indeed use, to all these transport entities spending no small beer on all these glitzy marketing led campaigns and collateral.

Somewhere along the way graphic design has been coerced into going against it's core mission. It's become an accomplice in creating chaos rather than alleviating it and it's exposed the turmoil these privatised companies help create. So, though none of these logos and identities are terrible, the fact that they have been commissioned at all looks bad for everyone.