- Client
- Hollow Bay Transit Authority
- Year
- 2025
- Discipline
- Identity & Systems
A nine-landing ferry network with one timetable and nine sign systems. We gave it a single language that holds up in salt air, fog and the ten seconds before a boat leaves.
The Hollow Bay fleet had been repainted six times in forty years, each time by a different contractor working from a different memory of what the boats used to look like. Nine landings carried nine sign systems, assembled over decades out of whatever the maintenance shed had. People who rode the network every day had learned to read it anyway. Everybody else asked the crew, and the crew answered the same four questions all day long.
We started at the dock rather than the drawing board. Two weeks of riding, in the dark and in the rain, timing the walk from the car park to the gangway, photographing every painted instruction and counting how many of them were still true. The most useful artefact of the whole project came out of that fortnight: a single sheet listing the four questions the crew were asked, in the order they were asked, at the moment they were asked. Everything the system does now is an attempt to answer those four questions before anyone has to speak.
What we built is deliberately small. One condensed alphabet cut for long landing names on short signboards. A numbering logic that stays legible at forty metres in weather. A two-ink palette chosen because it was the pair the authority's existing enamel supplier could match without tooling up. And a rule that no sign carries more than three lines, which killed roughly a quarter of the copy the authority wanted on the panels and produced the most difficult meeting of the engagement.
The hull livery is the part people photograph, but the part that actually changed the network is a nine-page fitting manual: where the panel sits relative to the gangway hinge, how high the number goes, what to do when the landing has a canopy and what to do when it does not. It was written for the maintenance shed, not for us, and it is the reason the system still looks like itself two seasons after handover.
Two winters in, the authority reports that the four questions have not gone away, but the crew now hears them from visitors rather than from regulars. That is roughly the outcome we promised, and it took a manual, not a mark, to get there.
