Active Cars

Overview

Active Cars is a UK private-hire taxi company. It came to us with a name and nothing else: no mark, no colour system and no guidelines. The brief was one line: "Here's our name, we need a logo."

The challenge

The fleet was already on the road without branding and was losing passenger recognition to competitors with clearer identities. The mark had to work on full vehicle livery, on small print like receipts and stickers, and as a digital avatar. It also had to signal legitimacy without spelling out a word like "licensed".

Approach

Reading the name on paper, we noticed the V already looked like a tick, so we built the mark around it. The wordmark reads as "ActiveCars" at first glance, and the tick shows itself on a second read. There's no separate icon and no simplified small-size variant.

Two craft decisions hold it together:

• Weight on the V. If the strokes are lighter, the tick fades. If they're heavier, it looks stuck on. We tested to find the narrow band where both readings stay legible.
• "Active" in white, "Cars" in black. The contrast is what gives the tick its silhouette.

The system uses two colours (Active Yellow and Pure Black, with white as an inversion), one typeface and one layout. Its usage guide fits on a single A4 page.

Deliverables included master wordmark vectors, the tick extracted as a standalone mark for stickers and favicons, hex and Pantone references, and a one-page usage guide. We didn't build the booking app or the website. The client's existing livery supplier printed the vehicle wraps from our files.

Outcome

Every vehicle in the fleet now carries the wordmark on the roof and doors. Driver uniforms use the same mark, and the booking-app avatar, Google Business Profile, WhatsApp picture and receipts all match. The work went from first brief to final hand-off in 14 days.