(16 Jan 2020, 5:59 pm)Dan wrote Not the plan at all.
Route branding is being rationalised and not used to the extent it was in years gone by, but the main effort now is to keep all brands within a "house style".
The new "house style", i.e. a two-tone livery with "road-stripes" (at a 55-degree angle - a la 55 degrees north!) separating them, was designed by Beacon Creative (not Best Impressions as suggested a few posts earlier).
The logic is that if all brands are kept within one "house style", then it is more recognisable as a Go North East bus, as it will have the signature "road-stripes" to identify it as such. X-lines and Toon Tour, being special brands, have these stripes in the opposite direction, so they're still inkeeping with the main theme, but look different enough so they stand out. The idea with X-lines was also so that it could create an "X" shape, denoting the express nature of the route.
Cheers Dan, I'm interested to see how the brand changes in the coming years, so far so good. Loving the improvements to overall bus standards & tickets all around, and from an outside perspective the MD's changes are noticeable to a standard passenger like myself.