Drum roll, please: Riders Alliance has a whole new look!
Today we’re unveiling a new brand – logo, colors, typeface – and a new website. It comes after months of strategic work, listening to our community, and seeking new ways to capture and uplift the excitement, inclusivity, and power of Riders Alliance.
Earlier this year, we set out to make engaging with Riders Alliance easier and more fun than ever before. We needed a clear and compelling brand to match our diverse and energized membership, and a new digital presence that invites people into our movement and allows us to grow and scale our community of rider activists.
Our aim was to embrace the values we hold near and dear at Riders Alliance: inclusivity, diversity, community. Through our new brand, we hope to inspire pride and appreciation for everything we’ve accomplished together and deliver an opportunity to celebrate our community, members, and mission as we enter our tenth year organizing riders!
Let’s talk shop on all the new features of the new Riders Alliance brand redesign:
Inspiration stems from our people-powered movement, our iconic transit system, and the diversity of the five boroughs.
Our new logo combines these elements into a modern mark – simplified for digital use and fitting for our grassroots organization.
The new color system is vibrant and spans to include our entire system of buses and trains.
From time-to-time we’ll use secondary logos to highlight our city and neighborhoods in a fun way.
And of course, we made sure the new brand passed the tote test!
We’re thrilled to get this makeover in time to mark our first decade, coming up in 2022. We’ve come a long way!
What started as the sparkle of an idea in 2012 — that riders should have a say in the decisions that impact all of us — has evolved into a powerful political constituency that has organized and won considerable victories moving us closer to the world-class transit system we deserve.
Our work began at local bus and subway stops, talking to and organizing riders around neighborhood battles, like better G train service. As we grew, we also began engaging with more riders online, embracing social media as a powerful method to recruit new voices and grow the reach of our message. When the Covid-19 pandemic brought us indoors and threatened the very existence of the transit system we all rely on, our digital channels became a critical forum for riders to lift their voices and hold elected leaders accountable. Throughout, we continued to embrace the winning attributes of our work over the last ten years: being strategic, being simple, and being straightforward.
Organizing communities to advocate for a better transit system requires that we cut through wonky, opaque transit policy and translate the complex systems we rely on into clear and crisp demands to improve the daily lives of riders. These are hallmark traits of our work. So we set out to very intentionally and professionally capture as many of the elements we love about Riders Alliance – our track record, our community, our values – into our new brand, our new website, and even into the new swag that we hope you will be wearing with pride soon.
We can’t wait for you to check out the new brand and website, with all of its new content and fun rides down memory lane. But most of all, we want to know, as we take this big new step forward: what do you want to see? We would love to know your thoughts. Please email us at info@ridersalliance.org or join us at an event soon!
Until then, we have big plans for our 10th anniversary with the needs of riders part of the national debate, a new governor, a new mayor, and a subway that still needs fixing and buses that still need speeding up. Our brand and website helps us attract more people to the movement, and gives each of us already on the journey a simple and strategic way to say: we are riders, and we’re in this together. 💪
One more thing… we’ll have new swag for everyone too! Watch out for these tees coming soon to an event near you.
