A 25 Year Train Journey

As part of our 25th Anniversary celebrations, we’re unveiling a fresh new look for Food Train, something modern and easy to use, with a whole family of logos to showcase all our services.  I’ve really had to move with the times and the main question for this new logo wasn’t “will it fax?” it was “will it look good on acrylic nails?” – who knew it was even possible to get logos on your nails!

Like most charities that start out very tiny and have grown bigger, anything we produced was a recipe of clipart, publisher and Microsoft paint, and depending on your skill level it was either ‘rubbish but cheap and does the job’ or ‘no bad if I do say so myself’ – I’ll let you decide on my effort from 18 years ago.

Old logo

Once we did move into the realms of a local printing company (thank you https://www.solwayprint.co.uk/) with designers who had programs much more sophisticated than my double disc publisher, we settled on something that felt very ‘us’.  Bright, cheerful, stands out in a storm rather than fit for a fancy art gallery; our first proper logo has served us extremely well for many years.  Despite it being notoriously difficult to get printed onto actual things, we ventured into pens, keyrings, notepads, handy cloth shopping bags and bright printed banners; we certainly always stood out at events.   

FT Logo

But even your favourite comfy slippers end up needing an upgrade and an anniversary year seemed good timing for us to get cracking on our new look.

With three distinct groups views to consider (our members, volunteers and staff), a total of over 3,500 people, it was always going to be tricky to please everyone, but keeping a sense of our identity, a ‘Food Train feeling’ about our new look, seemed important to all groups.  Once we’d all agreed that a name change was a step too far, the ask was refined and creating a new logo family showing off all our services was the task. 

Enter a rather energetic branding specialist volunteer via the Cranfield Trust, who taught us the science behind branding and helped us decide whether ‘house of brands’ or ‘branded house’ was the way to go.  Next was writing up the brand brief and a venture into the market place for a brand designer within a very tight budget.  Finally, after many months we were ready to short list from designs.   Sounds easy, you just pick your favourite.  Wrong!  It’s a massive decision and we needed to get down to the final two, but we really struggled to decide, liking bits of everything we saw, chopping and changing colours, word placing, you name it, we shifted it about.  The designer http://www.tom-holmes.co.uk/ was super patient with us, sensing our need for this new logo family to be modern but still feel like Food Train, he created something with a nod to our history and values but also fit for now and the years ahead.  It’s who we are; Food Train, and what we do; supporting older people.  I hope you like it.  I’m off for my nail appointment!

FoodTrain MasterLogo Colour RGB

Happy 25th Birthday Food Train

2
25th Anniversary Ball
25 Years of Kindness
 

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Thursday, 28 March 2024

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