Designing Our Media & Advocacy Group for Rail, Transit and Urbanism: Graphic Design (Patreon)

Nothing is more important than starting with a solid foundation, and when it comes to a modern company (especially a company in media/video/art), building a solid foundational graphical style is incredibly crucial to being successful.

Having a style and logo that is recognizable and decipherable instantly is one of the key goals that we have when setting everything in motion. Currently Miles Callan (Interurban Era) and I are working on the design of what our advocacy group will be called and how it will look.

We are pretty certain that we are going to continue to use the name Transcon for multiple reasons:1. I do not want something that is limiting like Strong Towns. As much as I like what they do, their scope is often too small and too focused on neighborhood only problems. Transcon needs to be focused on Regional, City and Intercity issues with Transit, Railroads, and Urbanism.

2. Our focus will be on getting ahead of the problems. Oftentimes transit/rail projects get hampered and die because the NIMBYs are the first ones to scene. We want to subvert that and create networks of people that can advocate for projects starting on day 1. So Transcon works because we care about all projects in North America, not just a singular city.

3. Back when we were working with RWU on the nationalization video with them, we floated multiple names for what the fantasy Nationalized railroad would be, Transcon was the lead contender for multiple reasons (it also sounds cool). But was eventually shot down by an older member for being too related in name to Transgenderism, not because that person was necessarily transphobic, but they feared that the campaign would get derailed in the current political climate for it. I absolutely hated that mindset, and that's always been a chip on my shoulder since we got that reply. This made me like the name even more, because if we want to build a proper future together, it's going to be for all of us.

4. We wanted a name that wasn't used or taken by some other company and we also wanted to distance ourselves from any commonly used words or phrases for advocacy groups. Other ideas for names that we liked a lot were Stop Requested and Prime Mover, with the former being too specifically related to buses, and the latter being too close to Amazon Prime in name for the average person.

5. Finally, Transcon is versatile. Have the prefix "Trans" means that in titles and projects we can swap out the "con" for Transit, Transfer, Transition, etc etc, allowing us to have fun with the graphic design in videos.

Speaking of Graphics, we're started doing mock ups on logos, typefaces and design styles. Attached are images of the thought process, but we really like the idea of basing most of our logos and concepts on a Split-Flap or Solari Board design. This really hammers home the concept intuitively that we're about transit, movement and cities. We're still in the middle of figuring out how this will all come together, but I'm happy to report that we're on our way.

More videos and projects to also come this week, thank you always for sticking around and helping us build something cool for all of you.

Best,

Alan