The (no longer very) new official site for public transport in Singapore has been online for about six months now, and while it still lacks some of the functionality, it’s an interesting site to look at from a design perspective. We at Supershapes did a small presentation for the LTA about brand design integration for public transport, and this site redesign was a part of a bigger presentation that I may post at some point in the future.

What first struck me when I looked at publictransport.sg is that it doesn’t look anything like the design that has been (sort of) implemented through the public transport network of Singapore. It looks more like IDA’s Wireless@SG, though it might be the name and the misused @-sign that seems to be ever so popular on government websites and condominiums (like, unfortunately, mine). This is not public transport at Singapore but public transport in Singapore.

So what has happened here is what seems to be happening in general when agencies develop sites, they create a completely new look and feel, disregarding the fact that it dilutes the brand, the information experience and thus confusing the users. The “symbol for the integrated public transport system” is strangely missing, the colours are green but completely the wrong shade, and they use a blue that’s almost LTA purple, yet not. They also refrain from using the official bus and train icons, and have instead created a new set of icons that has no reference to the information system already in place.

Lastly, of course, there are a lot of visual glitches, strange features and no integrated journey planner (although I hear some people are working on that). I also think the map is way too prominent for something that is not very useful in that sense. So while I was prepping some other stuff in the public transport brand presentation, I decided to take a day to look at how I would improve publictransport.sg.

1. Starting with the obvious - the top. As previously mentioned, the site should look and feel like the design already in place on maps, time tables and other information design for public transport in Singapore, using the symbol, the right colours and the right fonts. That doesn’t mean you can’t give it its own identity, yet still retain the recognition from the rest of the network.
2. Navigation. I don’t quite understand the general favoring uppercase text in the navigation, since it really decreases legibility not vice versa. I also think the structure of the site could be thought through more thoroughly.
3. The Journey Planner. Well, this is not available on the site yet, and the only link is to the previously mentioned one that TransitLink has. Yet, this will probably be the most important feature on the future site, and should be in the most prominent location.
4. The promo space (picture borrowed from Flickr, can’t find the URL right now). Here’s a great chance to create some brand value for the network. Instead of highlighting the service aspect, this space could be used to promote the more emotional values that you want to be associated with public transport. Like, in this case, discovery, and how you can explore Singapore with the help of the public transport network. I’ve borrowed this idea from sl.se, the Stockholm Public Transport Network website.
5. The two promotion spaces. This is where you’d promote your new services or features.
6. Realtime Information. There’s a description there already, but basically, it’d be nice to be able to just key in my location and see the real time information for buses or trains.
7. Service Interruptions. It might be good to know if you’re shutting down Orchard Road over CNY, if there’s a huge traffic jam affecting the network or if Bus 167 is being reverted.
8. “I need some help with…” might be a good way to pick out a few FAQs and link deeper into the site structure.
9. Latest News. Well, this is being used rather poorly at the moment. People using this site are probably not at all interested in news regarding the LTA and its tenders. Instead this should feature news related to public transport.
10. More services. A place to collect the MRT maps, the (somewhat hard to use) Key Bus Services Maps and other resources for download. That doesn’t mean that we should have unlabeled pdf links on the front page though.

That’s it for now. Of course I have a couple of more ideas for the subpages, and this is just a one day sketch that I thought would never see the light of day, but these are some of the basics that I think they should consider if and when they decide to redesign publictransport.sg.

And Supershapes and I’ll of course be more than willing to come in and help you out, LTA!

If you ever wondered what it is that we do at Supershapes, perhaps it’s time you check out the presentation I’ve spent the last few weeks on whipping together with one of my colleagues.

There’s also a more visual presentation available as a pdf, if big words scare you (you might wanna skip the first bunch of slides though, in that case).

Speaking of logos, my photographer friend Joan asked me the other day if I could help her out with her logo. It was a quick and dirty job, but I still kinda like how it turned out. I haven’t been doing any proper design lately. Just mockups and presentations, so this was a fun break in the boring world of Keynote slides.

On Saturday January 10th, about three months delayed, The Singapore Youth Olympics 2010 logo was unveiled, and the results of the public logo competition were announced.

I have to say up front that I didn’t have high hopes for it. Opening up a competition for the logo of an icon for what probably will be Singapore’s biggest event of 2010 did not seem like a good idea. The idea of separating the brand design identity tender and the logo competition is even worse, but that’s a story in itself. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for public participation, but there are things better suited for open competitions than this. Like perhaps a “name the mascot” competition.

And, well, the result was to be expected. This is from the Logo Fact Sheet PDF:

Spirit of Youth the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games Logo – celebrates Singapore 2010 in an adventurous, open and fun way. It evokes the Singaporean sense of confidence and progress.

The three distinct elements of the logo are:

The Flame of Passion
The intense red flame represents the passion to learn and the power of positive thinking. Red is also the national colour of Singapore.

The Star of Champions
The rich purple star symbolises excellence and the pride of representing one’s nation.

The Crescent of Tomorrow
The crescent reflects dynamic youth, full of promise. It has the lush green and calm blue colours of a tropical island city.

The Singapore 2010 Wordmark
Its active appearance comprises individual and unique characters that signify harmony among the diverse participants.

Spirit of Youth inspires all of us to express the Olympic spirit and celebrate the first-ever Youth Olympic Games.

I’ve already hinted that I wasn’t exactly blown away, and let me share a little bit about why I’m disappointed.

Firstly; What’s the big idea? What the heck am I looking at? How does it capture the Singapore spirit? This neither represents Singapore, nor the Olympic movement. At least not to me.

Secondly; it looks like a kid’s drawing (which it most likely isn’t, but I’ll get to that). That is probably the biggest mistake they could make. This is not the Olympics for Kids. These young athletes (14-18 years old, not just kids anymore) are the best in the world at what they do, and they probably don’t want to rally behind a symbol that looks like something their kid brother drew with finger paint in daycare.

But hey, it could have been worse! At least they didn’t flip the R in Singapore, for example.

Thirdly; is the logo’s hand drawn appearance, which unfortunately looks like someone used the default brushes in Adobe Illustrator, visually really a step forward? It looks more like the Sydney 2000 logo from back in the 90s, when hand drawn logos were “in”. It was nice back then, but why look back 10 years, when we’re supposed to be looking into the future? They had the chance to really push the envelope when it comes to modern identity design, to be inspired by some of the amazing Olympic logos done in the past, and bring the tradition to the next level for the Youth Olympics, and they completely botched it. This is a step backward. It’s conventional, sexless and very embarrassing, as my colleague put it.

Lastly; The rationale for the colours and the shapes is plain and predictable. It’s the usual mumbo jumbo that designers who don’t really know why they doodled something and picked the colours by random use to sell it to a client. On what planet does a purple, hand drawn star lacking a fifth point symbolise “excellence and the pride of representing one’s nation”?

All in all, a definite let down. And, since the logo competition is complete but no winners were announced (that I could find anyway), I’m assuming that there wasn’t a winner, and they got an agency to do it for them, thus certainly ending up paying a little more than just the mobile phone they had as a first prize in the competition. Which is cool, I think, since that’s what they should have done from the start. But then why have the competition at all?

The logo actually seems to be, at least to some extent, the work of the quite famous brand agency The Brand Union (seeing as the PDF contained this image).

Too bad. It could have been great. But, as a friend pointed out, this probably is the result of many, many compromises. The almost three month delay also seems to point to that being the case. But regardless why it looks like it does, it’s still a shame.

Check out more submitted logos (some definitely better than the “winner”) at the Singapore 2010 logo gallery.

75 Sinaran Drive

#10-01

308322 Singapore

Come visit!

After a little longer than initially anticipated, the gothere.sg redesign went live this morning, after poor Dominic stayed up coding until 7. It’s not 100% perfect yet, but it’s definitely getting there. There were a lot of cross browser issues (just when you think that different browsers are not an issue anymore), which had us pounding our heads against a wall on more occasions than one. But all in all, we are quite pleased with what we came up with. And knowing the passion and dedication of the people at Gothere you can be sure there’s loads more to come within the next few months. Trust me.

Our main focus with the redesign was, this time, just to give a facelift. We have lots of ideas for the future, but this time we tried to focus primarily on just making it look a little nicer, but to keep the basic, simple functionality of the existing design. We wanted to make it a little more playful, adding some colours, giving it some more contrast with different font sizes and also introduced a new set of icons, based on the logo.

Anyway, we’ve not only redesigned the website, but are also in the process of developing a whole new brand identity for gothere. The new logo looks like this:

The symbol element of the logo is the lowest common denominator for the visual identity. Although the main brand colour is green (for go, green light), the icon can come in virtually any colour, depending on context. The empty space inside is to be filled with other symbols or photos to serve as icons, stickers or anything else. The symbol is simple yet visually easily recognizable, rounded to portray openness and friendliness, and it helps convey the gothere brand value keywords of boldness, passion and simplicity.

All in all, I’m happy to have been a part of helping one of Singapore’s most indispensable services websites / tools become a little friendlier and easier on the eyes.

There will be much more to check out at gothere.sg soon, so stay tuned to the gothere blog.

Now go find some directions.

After emailing the Deputy Director for Public Transport Promotion Division of LTA about two weeks ago, I gave him a call on friday last week. Not that I think I came across as a brilliant phone person myself, but he said that they haven’t even gotten started on the journey planner yet(!), and all in all he seemed very reluctant to get help from any outsider. I guess I’ll bug him again in a month’s time or so, just to be obnoxious.

In other news; I’ve teamed up with the people at gothere.sg to help them develop a new overall design and brand identity to the gothere brand. It’s very exciting, they are brilliant and passionate people, with a great service, and working with them is loads of fun. Although the logo and most of the brand is done, the website is taking longer than anticipated to put together. Hopefully something will be live in about a week and a half or so.

More on this later.

I wasn’t prepared to get so much (if any) response to the things I posted on thursday, and though I’m thankful I’m a bit embarrassed that I didn’t spend more time on my sketches.

Anyway, Daniel over at Singapore’s Land Transport, pointed me in the direction of the new tender to redesign the bus stop poles, so with his help I was able to find the actual design that will be implemented (subject to changes, naturally). And it was fun to see that I wasn’t completely off the mark, although the visuals provided in the tender were more thorough than mine. The new ones are actually really good. I can’t link directly to the file, so for details on the tender, go to  GeBIZ, click on Tenders & Quotations, and then search for Signcraft Installations. They fix most of the problems I’ve had with the current ones, although, I can’t help but to poke around a little bit and make some modifications to them.

This is what they’ll look like (theirs to the left, my modifications to the right):

As you can see, the new stop pole is about 1000 times better than the old one. Now for my modifications.

A. It seems the LTA is fixed on making the bus stop code the biggest and most prominent part of the stop (second to the public transportation logo on the right side). Why? How many people currently know the bus stop code of the stop nearest to them? Also, this code is not very prominent in other pieces of information design around public transportation. It’s not on the Bus Services guide, it’s not in signs in the MRT showing the way to the nearest bus stop… The only places that has them is the online journey planners and the transit link book. So, obviously, it should be smaller.

B. Instead they’ve made the actual name of the stop (which is prominent on the bus services guide, for instance) almost illegible, and especially if you were to be on the bus. Upsize, please!

C. I implemented my idea of separating the night rider buses from the “normal” ones. Since they don’t run all the time, they should stick out a little.

The biggest problem with this current tender, that I see, however, is that it only covers the actual pole. This may not mean, however, that the LTA doesn’t have plans to look into the design of the rest of the stop, but still, these should definitely be overhauled at the same time. I modified my old sketches and implemented the new design, but kept some of my original ideas:

Especially, I combined my idea for the simpler “via” information tables with the current “Real-time bus information” panel released earlier. I frankly don’t see the point of having the arrival times of the two next buses visible (when the first one isn’t very accurate for starters). Instead, make that sign more usable by

1. Providing information of what buses populate the stop, in big type that is legible from the street or across it.
2. Showing a couple of “prominent” stops that the buses stop at on their way to their termination stop

Here’s a better picture:

That’s all for now. There also have been some developments on the front of the journey planner, especially since TransitLink released their updated version on Friday. Compare that one to the one at GoThere.sg, just for kicks. GoThere may not have in their own words, the most “pleasing” design, but it does its job extremely well (at least during the time I’ve played with it), and it’s vastly superior to anything else that I’ve found. TransitLink has really taken the complete reverse approach, making something that is basically as complex and difficult to use as possible.

More on this later.