Case study · Brand & identity · Information design · Wayfinding Studio concept
Meridian
An identity for a transport information consultancy, built out of the one thing its work is actually about: the places where routes meet.
Self-initiated. Not commissioned work, no client involved, brief set by me.
Veyra Rail, an invented network built to test the standards
The brief
Design a consultancy whose logo has to survive the same test as its work.
Meridian designs the systems that make transport networks understandable: network identity, mapping, passenger information, wayfinding, signage standards and the interfaces that carry them. A studio doing that work cannot have a mark that only holds together on a website.
So I set two conditions. Everything had to be drawn from a fixed geometry with a number behind every decision, and none of it counted until it had been run against a real network. That second condition is where most identity standards quietly stop.
- Brief set by
- Andrew A. Stewart
- Year
- 2026
- Studio
- Northmarker, Lochgilphead
- Output
- Standards v3.0
- Scope
- Mark · Node system · Wordmark · Lockups · Colour · Working prototype
- Status
- A concept. Meridian is not a company and Veyra is not a city. The drawing rules are real and the prototype runs.
The idea
A centre that is never drawn.
Four routes on two bearings. Because parallel lines never meet, four lines produce exactly four intersections, arranged around a centre point that does not exist as artwork.
That absence is the whole argument. Meridian’s work is the connection, not the vehicle, so the mark is made entirely of the places where things meet and of nothing else. There is no train in it, no wheel, no abstract swoosh standing in for motion.
It also means the logo is built from the same component as the maps: an interchange node. The mark is a small piece of the work rather than a picture of it.
Wordmark & lockups
Drawn, not typeset.
Cap height 60, stroke 5, a 1:12 ratio held at every size. Joins are round, so every vertex lands exactly on the cap line rather than spiking past it. Seven kerned pairs are fixed as data, because even tracking opens holes where a bare stem meets a diagonal.
The counter of the A is a red disc, and it is a node rather than a decoration
The wordmark sits at 0.357 of the mark height, about 15% smaller than an optically matched setting. That is deliberate: the mark carries the colour, the weight and the idea, and the wordmark only names it.
The node system
Every meeting has to be declared.
Lines are only colour and direction. A node is where the passenger has a decision to make, so the node system is the substance of the identity rather than a detail of the map style.
The governing rule is that there is no neutral overlap. Either a node says a connection exists, or the lower line breaks to say it does not. A drawing containing a meeting that does neither is not ambiguous, it is wrong.
Interchange
You can change lines here
Two or more services meet and the passenger may transfer. The default node: if a meeting connects, this is what it gets, however important the station is. Importance is expressed by label size, never by node size.
Terminus
The line ends here
The largest node in the system, and the only one allowed to sit off the end of a stroke rather than on it. A branch that terminates on another line takes this, not an interchange ring, because stopping and connecting are different facts.
Handover
One track, two services
The corridor continues, the service running on it changes. The only circumstance in which a line may change colour, and the colour changes exactly at the node.
Station
A stop, no connection
One line calls here and nothing meets it. A tick struck across the track, round-capped, always perpendicular to its own bearing.
Crossing
Lines cross, no connection
Two lines pass at different levels. The lower line breaks; the upper line is unbroken and unchanged. Never a hop, a bridge or a thinner stroke.
Planned
Not open yet
Under construction or consultation. Dashed track and a hollow node, the exact inverse of an open one. It is filled in on the day it opens and at no point before.
Six types, no seventh
New situations are expressed by combining the six, never by inventing another. A two-branch decision tree resolves any meeting on a drawing, and anything that does not resolve there is not a node.
The ring rule
Every solid node carries a ring in the ground colour and a fill in that colour’s counter. Not white, not grey, not a tint. The node inverts completely rather than partially, which is what keeps reversed artwork identical instead of approximate.
Colour & scale
Night and paper are the brand.
The five line colours are a working set. They exist to be assigned to routes in client work, and they appear in the identity only as evidence that the system does what it claims to.
Line Blue
#2E9BD6
1 Estuary Line
Line Green
#34C27E
2 Northgate Line
Line Yellow
#F2C230
3 Vale Line
Line Red
#E8452F
4 City Circle
Line Violet
#B08BE8
5 Crossbridge Line
Night
#0A0A0B
The ground almost everywhere. Not black.
Paper
#F4F2EC
Print, light interfaces and the counter of every node on night.
Nodes drop in a fixed order.
As artwork gets smaller, detail comes off in a published sequence rather than by eye. Station ticks go first, then handover and planned nodes, and below 24px the mark reduces to one line on each bearing and a single interchange node. Below 16px it is not used at all.
The point of writing that down is that two people reducing the same artwork independently arrive at the same drawing. In interface work the radius never changes between states either, because a node that grows on hover makes the map appear to move under the passenger’s finger.
In the world
Veyra Rail, the test case.
A standards document is only a claim until something is drawn with it. So I built a network: five lines, an inner circle, a river, a branch to an airport that has not opened, and a working journey planner sitting under the map.
What building it actually caught.
Drawing a real network surfaced things the standards had been vague about. The Vale Line runs diagonally, and a station tick perpendicular to a 45° bearing looks wrong until you accept that vertical ticks are the thing that is wrong. Where the City Circle crosses the Northgate Line without connecting, the break in the lower line has to be ground colour, and on a tinted panel that is a third value again.
The planner forced the node states to earn their keep too. Selected, hover and focus all had to read at a glance without the radius moving, which is exactly the constraint the standards had asserted without proving.
Handover is the one node type the network never needed. It stays in the standard, marked as unused here, because a type that exists for a situation Veyra does not have is not the same as a type that was wrong.
Outcome
A logo you can draw a map with.
No consultancy was founded and no passenger ever used it. What this set out to test is whether an identity can be built from the same parts as the work it describes, and whether writing the rules down as numbers actually makes them repeatable.
The mark is a component
Four intersections drawn to the map’s own geometry. The logo and the network are made of the same thing, which is the argument the whole identity rests on.
Numbers, not adjectives
Every dimension is a multiple of the stroke width, so the system scales from a 16px favicon to a 40mm signage panel without anybody making a judgement call.
Still outstanding
One network is one test. Nothing here has been through physical signage, a real printer, or a passenger who was in a hurry and did not care about the geometry.
Self-initiated. Not commissioned work, no client involved, brief set by me. Meridian is invented, and so are Veyra and every station on it.
Got something complicated that has to be understood quickly?
That is the most interesting kind of brief there is.