WBFO The Bridge, the newest addition to the Buffalo Toronto Public Media family of stations, launched on November 23, 2021. Incredibly hard to believe we were able to go from our first committee meeting to launching the station in a little over 3 months.
The Bridge was born out of a simple idea: to bring a non-commercial AAA (Adult Album Alternative) radio station to Western New York and Southern Ontario. We set out to play the best post-modern, classic, old school, indie, new wave, underground, and alternative music. It’s quite a mouthful, try saying that on-air (I have!).
I’ve been working on WBFO The Bridge since its inception. Actually, that’s not even true. I’ve been with it before it began, as just an idea during my first meeting with our new President & CEO. It’s an incredibly enjoyable and exciting project to be a part of, and being able to create the logo, brand, campaign, all from scratch has been a ton of fun.
Logo
Like any branding campaign, the logo sets the tone. For me, I knew I needed to still use our BTPM family font, PBS Sans, so that The Bridge would aesthetically match the rest of our stations, if only in font. But we also wanted The Bridge to be a little different, quirky, and to stand out. It is purposely a sandbox for us to experiment.
While doodling on my iPad Pro one day I had a quick idea in my head: the logo should incorporate a stylized version of the Peace Bridge, the crossing between Buffalo, New York and Fort Erie, Ontario, the titular “Bridge” from the station name. The design of the Peace Bridge features a distinctive round Parker Truss over the Black Rock Canal on the U.S. side, and it was this feature I chose to incorporate in my sketch.
The logo sketch itself was one of those perfect “designed in as long as it takes me to get the idea out” and that was it. I passed it around as my rough idea and it was quickly approved, so I created a finalized version in Illustrator. The logo doesn’t fit the standard CALL LETTERS – LOGO – BRAND that I’d established during our brand overhaul. I wish I could say it was on purpose, but we all fell in love with the way the logo looked that no other options or ideas were even attempted.
The primary color for The Bridge brand would be black. A Forest Green and Steel Gray were also proposed as a nod to the colors of the materials on the Peace Bridge, but black just fit the aesthetic and mood we were trying to establish. How much more black could it be? The answer, of course, was none.
I finalized the logo in Illustrator with our font and that was it! Or so I thought.
After completing the Band Logo Artwork (see further below) I quickly fell in love with the more gritty, less-corporate feeling of my drawn version of the logo. This felt right. I photoshopped the logo out of the scanned drawing and began to slowly incorporate it into social media posts and some other internal uses. After a little amount of time went by, I made my case that this should be the proper, public-facing logo for The Bridge. Again, everyone agreed. The clean “Corporate” version of the logo would be used sparingly in-house and the gritty version would be used as often as possible.
The “drawn” logo aesthetic is topped off with a dark grey grunge background. That, combined with the off-white color of the inverted sharpie drawing, really set the foundation for the rest of the branding campaign.
Tagline & Initial Imagery
When tasked with starting a new radio station from scratch, we wanted to come up with a short, concise tagline to help convey what we are and what we play. The phrase “College Radio For Adults” was casually mentioned in passing during one of our committee meetings, and I wrote it down as a great tagline. Sure enough, a few weeks later we were brainstorming a slogan and I recalled the note I wrote down. I reminded the group, everyone thought it worked well, and it stuck.
For our rollout, we had the idea to create stickers and magnets to send to early social media fans as a thank you gesture and to help drum up some interest. To start things off, we really wanted to lean hard into the tagline so that, even if people didn’t know anything about us, they would see “College Radio For Adults” and either an 80s, 90s, or 00s alternative sticker and be curious enough to look further.
I had the idea to create a series of stickers, one each representing a decade of music we play. It was important that the stickers were obviously different designs, so the ideas might not have represented the music we play but the decades they represent. For the 1980s, I wanted to go with an admittedly stereotypical retrowave aesthetic design. For the 1990s, something straight out of the pop-art Saved By The Bell style. For the 00s, pop-punk ransom note letters. For a “modern” logo, I wanted something that would work across genres and be a bit more evergreen.
I have no shame admitting I got some help with most of these. The 80s were, by and large, templates that we paid for and I repurposed. The 90s were a bit more manipulated on my end. The ransom notes were all part of a pack, I did spend a good amount of time meticulously browsing the dozens of options per letter.
For the modern-day one, I chose a cool looking block font that had two options, one looking like cut-out letters and the other standard letters. I really liked that the counter of certain letters were completely filled in. It looked cool and unique.
I wound up incorporating several elements from these stickers into the final “brand” of The Bridge:
– I liked the cutout font so much that it became the default font for the brand campaign. Almost everything I create uses this font in one form or another, usually askew or at some kind of angle.
– The image of the Peace Bridge is a not-so-subtle callback to our logo and makes for a good background. For the main Bridge brand, I removed the color and edited the photo so it was suitable for backgrounds.
– The grungey gray background texture from the cutouts became the overlay or background for most of The Bridge brand moving forward.
