Rethinking the London Overground: TfL’s biggest rebranding project in decades

Design geeks will be well acquainted with everything from Edward Johnstone’s London Underground roundel (1919) to Harry Beck’s Tube Map (1931) and the moquette fabric that has been used for decades on seat covers and is even sold by the meter at the London Transport Museum shop.

The Overground opened in 2007, enabling fast travel traversing the east of the city on both sides of the river. Since then, it has branched out to comprise six separate lines. As the lines were all delineated in its signature orange, this has provided a navigation headache for many passengers, “particularly at interchanges,” according to TfL head of digital experience Hanna Kops. Kops led on UX, digital design and strategy, working alongside TfL head of design Jon Hunter.

Meanwhile, external design partner DNCO was brought in to look at the naming of the lines. This five-month research project sought to understand untold stories across London, engaging all stakeholders before naming ideas were developed with the help of wordsmiths such as writers and poets.

One thread that stood out from this was that Londoners were interested in “movements and moments” representing everyday people, according to DNCO strategy director Simon Yewdall.

The newly named lines are Windrush (red), Lioness (yellow), Mildmay (Blue), Weaver (pink), Suffragette (green) and Liberty (gray).

Yewdall has many anecdotes demonstrating the depth of research carried out to reach this stage, not least the perspective of The Commission for Diversity in the Public Realm, which, having reported back on the representation of street names, statues and other public infrastructure, shared that “the factual identity of London, let alone the incredible contributions of people from non-white backgrounds are not being represented,” according to Yewdall, who adds: “Part of the brief was to make sure we show hidden histories.”

There was also a lot of gathering of public opinion across the Overground’s 113 miles of track. “We rode the lines for days and days,” he says.

The digital experience, “which encourages clarity and boldness,” was central to the development of the project, according to Kops, and “informed the end-to-end experience and the rebrand overall, which sits within the digital world.”

A wall of spaghetti

The rebrand “is an ambition of the mayor and improves the wayfinding of the Overground network that has grown significantly over the years and become quite complex to navigate,” says Kops. “We’ve been aware of the customer pain points for quite some time. When you interchanged from one overground line to the other in the past, it’s all orange, all had the same name and you didn’t know where you were, particularly when you were inside the carriage.”

Yewdall refers to the Overground section of the map as “a wall of spaghetti on a line used by 700,000 people a day.”

The other main issue was finding it difficult to know the status of the lines. “If it just says the entire Overground is disrupted, it’s very hard to imagine where it’s happening now and how that might affect you,” adds Kops.

One of her main challenges was dovetailing the physical and digital world. Much of this is reconciled on the TfL Go app (which has won various design awards) and is a good evocation of how the newly named and colored lines appear in the context of the tube map. The app map is coded so can show isolated disruption on the new lines which are coloured in parallel bars.

“Retaining a distinction was hard. There are only so many colors in the world. You need colors that work in the context of the map and, in some cases, they overlap and interact with each other. Working out the solution to that was mainly the job of TfL head of design John Hunter, who did an excellent job,” says Kops.

Final colors were chosen by TfL but only after a “total technical exercise, a color puzzle piece,” says Yewdall. “You have to think about things like what the red Windrush line will look like when it hits the red Central line.”

Online and offline, the orange roundel of the Overground remains to signify the mode of transport. “Beyond that, each line has its own color and a dual line approach so customers can see it’s a rail mode,” says Kops.

Real-world and digital nuances made Kops’s work painstaking. “We had to work through the entire customer experience, thinking about things such as status information on a very small screen. Also, colors on a screen and printed are not the same. They’re not only different in terms of RGB and CMYK; they’re actually different colors.”

Accessibility is another consideration. “We needed to not add noise but instead create a really clear design of the tube map, particularly reducing complexity and really considering accessibility in that context,” she says, adding that the digital update needed to integrate with the “calm and grounding experience” of the go app.

That meant being able to turn features on and off on digital versions of the app map, such as step-free access. “It’s the first completely digitalized metro map in the world. It’s completely data-driven.

Yewdall notes that the Overground is well used by people with different needs as “it’s quiet, there’s heat, air conditioning and generally more accessible stations.”

Kops adds: “We’re taking the same diagrammatic approach as Harry Beck would have while trying to work out how to simplify complex updates, adding functionality such as live status updates but with the same design thinking as him.”

Signage covered in stickers ahead of the big reveal

Following the rebrand announcement in February, it was decided to work towards a coordinated launch, which Kops said would cut down on any customer confusion.

Practical challenges meant that ahead of launch week, given the scale of the reveal, signage was covered with stickers across the network so that the updated lines could all be revealed in one go.

Rebranding anything poses an innate challenge: Is it worth renaming something? Will it be embraced and how can that be communicated? TfL launched into this project with improving customer experience in mind and engaging as many people as possible to produce something as understandable as possible.

Yewdall says DNCO encouraged TfL to go beyond the rebrand and unveiling to show how the communities being celebrated have not only been engaged but are taking ownership of their new lines.

“There will be a lot of cultural events and education programs. With the Windrush line for example, there was an exhibition at Dalston Junction where the Windrush generation were talking about their experiences,” he says.

A new way of telling your story as a city

It’s this idea of ownership that has really permeated the project. Passengers used to talk about ‘the Overground,’ ‘the East London Line’ or, affectionately, ‘The Ginger Line,’ which is a branding nightmare in itself. “London is a dynamic city and it’s always changing,” says Yewdall, who is reflecting on what passengers will get out of the rebrand. “Principally, it can now do its job better and help more people navigate.”

But there’s something else, he says: “It’s a new way of telling your story as a city. What is London now saying to itself and to those communities who maybe don’t feel represented? How can we lift those communities up? How can we encourage them to feel part of London – which they are, of course? What does it say for the brand of London?

“We’ve been saying for years that we’re open for business, we’re inclusive and we celebrate people, but if we have a public infrastructure to demonstrate this, it can be really powerful.”