On Wheels

Vintage feel with a luxurious twist? We love it.

That’s why my eyes were attracted by the gorgeous logo (& some of its application too) which I’m here today to analyze. The project it’s called “On Wheels” and it’s the identity for a Moscow bicycle store, by Misha Jers.

Let’s start the analysis. I find the condensed version to be almost perfect. It recall the W initial while playing on two sides and with its lines, it’s a visual call to some utterly cool handlebars and a tire, notable by the texture, in the middle. Unbelievable.

It’s unique, simple & brand/object related – and it curvatures and rounded angles make it friendly and approachable. Also, the font used as a descriptive tagline it’s well chosen too: I mean, the “CYC” part, with its roundness and large proportions remind myself a basic bicycle shape as well.

On the same guidelines, Misha made the complete wordmark – custom script, rounded angles, big & bold curvatures, same tagline. Unfortunately, this version does not work well as the condensed part. Some letters are feeling weird and are pretty unreadable, a little help could have come from using more ligatures, especially on the “eels” part – ligatures that are incomprehensibly missing.

Each “e” it takes a long time to be recognized as one, while the ‘s’ is way more similar to a reverted ampersand – cutting away the curl would have helped a lot.

Talking about the initials: the O suffer from wide constriction – it’s a keen detail using the same negative space as the width of the stroke, but this left the ending of the letter with no space to breathe. It was easier to make it end a little earlier inside the counter. The W, well, it’s just not the same and that’s a negative thing: without the endings we lose the visual link to some vintage handlebars and a “Wh” awesome ligature too – Too bad.

The only thing we can think about is the fact that the client asked for later mods on the logo that may have been, initially, written down with the tagline font, having fell in love with the custom W like we did. Only way to explain the lack of details and attention given to what would have been, otherwise, a perfect logo.

Talking about the application of the logo on the brand materials, especially the bicycles themselves, it’s a ballgame: the two versions are used maybe too many times on a single one, from what we can see from the images they appear, counting both, at least eight times on a single bike. Getting rid of some of them would help with a cleaner, more luxurious and desirable aspect, especially talking about the central front W, contained in a weird rounded hexagon logo container.

Instead, some of them are just overwhelming: the little w on the back on the handlebars make me drool.

Luckily, both version aren’t used together at the same time.

As a final thought, some quick restyle of the applications and of the wordmark would likely be needed, (that weird rounded hexagon logo-container must go!) but after all, it’s a good work the one we got here.