RTD bus pass design
Denver's Regional Transportation District just won a design award from the American Public Transportation Association, a body that clearly shouldn't hand out design awards.
As someone who uses RTD, I'm often frustrated with the hard to use and ugly maps. Then there's the ugly website, the ugly signage, the ugly timetables, and the ugly graphics on the buses themselves.
You may remember the piece on the in-house design studio of Los Angeles' Metropolitan Transit Authority (above) in the September/October 2006 Communications Arts.
LA's system has really nice stuff. I hope that Denver's RTD will eventually get to that level, too.
On a note about the Denver Post article: it's a one-source story. No one was interviewed except for the RTD designers. Why not talk to some leaders within Colorado's design community? At the very least some users of the bus passes? Multiple sources is what distinguishes journalism from press releases – it makes me sad to see our "paper of record" giving us content that would be better suited for PR Newswire.
I guess this is what we get from the disintegrating newspaper industry, even though today the Post reported profits up 48% at our two dailies (against an 11% drop in revenue).
4 comments:
read the article... it doesn't say they just won....
Second to last para: "The efforts paid off, earning the team a first-place award for monthly pass design from the American Public Transportation Association."
I'd rather have busses and light rail and ugly passes than none at all. That said, since we do have some decent public transportation around here it seems like its time to turn it up a notch all around, I even dream of cooler looking trains and busses in the future, and signage and printed material to match.
I'd rather have busses and light rail and ugly passes than none at all. That said, since we do have some decent public transportation around here it seems like its time to turn it up a notch all around, I even dream of cooler looking trains and busses in the future, and signage and printed material to match.
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