If you popped over to the CrossCountry Trains (XC) social feeds since 21 July, you may have noticed something a little different with their ‘profile picture’…it became ‘Pridised’.
What you may or may not know is that as a small favour to a friend, Andy Garden, whom works at XC as one of their Customer Communications Specialists, it was myself that created the little item for him.
Late one evening…
The tail started late on the evening of Saturday 24 June with a message..
“Fancy doing me what’s probably a five min job for you……but I dunno how to it? ?”
This small job was to a to create pride variant of the XC logo – with one of two purposes:
- Celebrate the first time the Pride Flag was used in 1978
- CrossCountry’s sponsorship of Weston-super-Mare Pride on Saturday 29 July 2017.
In honesty I was out at the time until the wee small hours, but regardless of this, we bounced a few initial ideas back and forth either emulating either the popular TfL Pride Roundel or Virgin Trains style to be put on the XC profile in order to work to a steer towards such as:
- The ‘X’ on onside given the rainbow treatment and the other side retaining either it’s while or red.
- The whole ‘X’ given the rainbow treatment
- The ‘X’ retain its corporate look and the background changed
Early morning options
Now, even though I didn’t role in until after 0400 Sunday Morning, I had created a few of the initial concepts through to Andy for when he rolled in for his shift at 0600! – Mad
Later on, during the day further messages back and forth and more work was done, mainly altering the alignments the rainbow to try and match the ‘X’ – or ‘supergraphic’ as it called in XC – alignment – which resulted in the following variations:
At this stage, option 6 was the preferred one. However, we both felt it still wasn’t it. If you look at how the rainbow is aligned it looks amateurish.
The final push
So I started digging a bit deeper which ultimately led me to doing something I’ve never done before in Illustrator – changing the perspective viewing point of the rainbow.
It was a bit of a fiddle but as you’ll see in option 7, after a bit of trial and error, it looks better and fits the style way of the ‘supergraphic’.
And it was this 7th tweak that was agreed that Andy would put forward to be proposed together with the full XC logo and a ‘Twitter Notice Board’.
Going live on the line
It took a few weeks, with an of unexpected turn or two, to get the final agreement of the logo to be used, but when it went live on both twitter and facebook it was warmly received when launched together with suggestions it should appear on fleet – now that would be something nice to see maybe in the future – to perhaps staff sundry items such as lapel pin badges / lanyards etc
You can see the social reactions, together with shares / retweets / like etc at:
The CrossCountry Pride Logo remains the intellectual property of XC Trains Limited – part of Arriva, a DB Group company – and has been released back to the company for them to use in the future / until the end of the franchise in its current logo or until such time the XC Trains logo is revised.