Swapfiets
The blue front tire
This is quite sudden, but I love bicycle. I’m not like the one rides on a road bike with a racer jersey and pants but I love pedaling through city. For most of people who like me, Amsterdam is one of the cyclist heavens so I had also wanted to go there for a long time. And this summer, finally I went there by car with my bike then I cycled in the city everyday.
Soon, I realized that there were so many bikes with blue front tire.
First, I was thinking that maybe it’s a kind of trend in this city, but I got the answer immediately. These bikes are the ones of Swapfiets, a bike subscription service founded in 2014 by three technical students in Delft, a city in the Netherlands.
Swapfiets started in a very classical way. A group of friends having a good idea and just trying it out. For a fixed price a month you get a Swapfiets bicycle and we ensure your Swapfiets bicycle always works.
It turned out to be a great concept. After a period of fixing up bikes ourselves, Swapfiets has now arrived at a point where it has designed its own bicycle and started spreading out the service to a growing number of cities.
The iconic blue front tire is placed on every bicycle. This way you can always tell which bicycles belong to Swapfiets and who is part of our family.
Meanwhile more and more people find out just how convenient Swapfiets is. Epic service, made easy.
Visual identity doesn’t need to be drawn on Illustrator
You may already know (specially if you are graphic designer) but almost every visual identity is created on Illustrator or other applications supporting vector graphics. So sometimes we (designers) tend to think that visual identity MUST be an image. But actually not. This innovative service with an iconic OBJECT reminds me that everything could be visual identity. And if it’s related the service, it could much stronger than a vector image.
I’m still curious about who designed it but probably it was an idea of one of the founders.
