Iron Range Bus Lines is an independent school bus company based out of Thunder Bay. This is my family's company, and something that I grew up around. The company has been around since 1940, and its logo has remained mostly unchanged since.
With this project, I took the company , its logo, and its identity, and modernized. The goal here was to create something that still felt recognizable as the company that has serviced the area for decades, but make it feel fresh and new. A full set of brand guidelines and a logo animation were also created to round out the whole assignment.
In the initial approach to the project, I created two fully finished logo designs before bringing them to both my professor and a family member in the business to decide which to move forwards with. I tried to pick two quite different concepts, one more classic "school bus" and one focusing more on the children, since Iron Range prides themselves on the children they transport and their safety.
Upon the classic "yellow bus" logo being more popular, I began to work on brand guidelines and other aspects that would help create a more cohesive and polished look for the company. As it stands, Iron Range doesn't tend to branch out from their basic designs and their main student busing, but when it does the branding and designs used tend to become random and clash with the core designs. To help combat this, I created the full brand guidelines, so that if this redesign were to be used, anything else that would be created or changed would have something cohesive to follow.
