Most identity projects start with a mood board. Ostra started with a thermos of coffee and two mornings on the piers, watching how people actually found their boat.
What we saw changed the brief. Nobody looked at the logo. People looked for the hour, then the pier number, then the boat. If any of those three were hard to read from twenty metres away, they asked a crew member, and the crew member pointed at a sign that was hard to read.
Two mornings, one notebook
We arrived for the first sailing at ten to seven and stayed until the commuter rush had gone. Liv kept the notebook. Every time someone stopped, turned round or asked for help, she wrote down where they were standing and what they were looking at.
By the end of the second morning there were ninety-one marks on the page. Sixty of them were in two places: the ticket hall door and the top of the ramp to piers three and four. That was where the old signs gave up.
The hour is the hero
So the timetable became the heart of the system. The hour is set large, the minutes small, one departure per line. That single decision shaped the wordmark (tall and condensed, so it reads at distance), the colours (the navy of the hulls, for contrast in bright sun) and the app (which opens on the next departure, not a menu).
We tested the timetable the same way we found the problem. Printed at full size, taped to the hall door and read from the far wall. If a line needed a second look, it was rewritten.
If a passenger can’t find the boat, the brand has failed, however good it looks.
What we’d tell anyone starting a rebrand
Go and stand where your customers stand. Bring a notebook. Count how many times someone squints. That number is your brief.
It costs two mornings and a flask of coffee. It saved Ostra a round of logo sketches nobody needed, and it gave every later decision a reason a passenger would understand.
