Pentagram Creates Identity for Brooklyn Queens Connector

admin May 18, 2016 Categories: Freight & Transport, Social & People

Pentagram Creates Identity for Brooklyn Queens Connector

Pentagram has created the identity for a proposed streetcar linking the New York waterfront from Brooklyn to Queens.

The BQX streetcar is said to be a landmark initiative for New York. Projected to serve more than 15 million annual riders by 2035, the line represents the first new rail system since the subway began service more than a century ago.

Pentagram’s Paula Scher and her team have designed the identity, website and visual system for the proposal and for Friends of the Brooklyn Queens Connector, the not-for-profit organisation that is supporting the City’s efforts to make the streetcar a reality.

Naming was said to have been the first consideration in the development of the identity.

“The project could not use the acronym ‘BQC,’ because it sounds too much like BQE, the name that New Yorkers colloquially use for the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, the highway that already links the two boroughs. But ‘BQX’ works as shortened moniker for the streetcar, and stands apart from the BQE. Along with express, the ‘X’ can suggest external, or extra—the system will be above-ground, outside of Manhattan, and runs apart from the subway. The streetcar can also begin to be thought of as the ‘X train,’ a letter not currently used by the existing subway system,” says Pentagram.

The logo, meanwhile, incorporates a segmented arrow and “X” that come together to suggest “connection, speed and efficiency”, according to the designers.

The identity program also covers graphic elements – maps, custom icons and visual guidelines – that will be used in the campaign to build support over the next several years.