Case study 01
Tidelark Ferries
Sixty-one years old, four island routes, three logos, and passengers who just called it “the boat”.
- Client
- Tidelark Ferries
- Scope
- Identity, livery, wayfinding, tickets
- Time
- Nine weeks, 2026
The brief
Tidelark had grown by buying smaller operators and keeping their paint. The same company showed up as a blue anchor, a red pennant and a clip-art gull, depending on which pier you stood on. Tourists queued for the wrong boat. Locals didn't care, until a rival started running the summer route.
They asked for a new logo. What they needed was to be spotted from a kilometer away, in rain, by someone holding a suitcase.
The idea
The name was already doing the work: a lark and a tide. I drew the bird from two wave arcs, the same curve the hulls cut through the water, so the mark could be painted two meters tall by a boatyard with a stencil and a roller. Then I took everything else away. One coral, one navy, one typeface, on every surface.
In the world
Hulls went navy with one coral lark on each side, large enough to read across the harbor. Piers got a single route color bar and a number. Tickets became one tear-off strip with the departure time as the biggest thing on it, because that's the only thing anyone reads with a suitcase in one hand.
Next case studyQuince & Ledger“A deckhand's kid drew it on the slipway in chalk. That's when I stopped arguing about the coral.”