Cotral
People at the core
Cotral is the leading domestic provider of suburban public transport lines, whose sole shareholder is Regione Lazio. The company connects 376 municipalities across the Lazio region and a further 17 from neighbouring regions. Cotral provides 8,000 connections a day and every year more than 70,000,000 people use its buses and trains.
Inarea partnered Cotral in 2004, intervening on a previous brand identity situation, and again in 2016, when the company decided to renew its fleet and range of user services. Inarea accompanied Cotral in this transition, focusing on the citizen-customer transport experience to overcome the typical diffident perception of commuting.
The design is borrowed from the world of leisure and graphically translates into the colours of the rainbow, which distinguish vehicle and various touchpoint liveries. The colour blue is also a reference to the first bus and light rail connections provided by Stefer, the company that once managed regional transport.
The graphic and font composition of the logotype is inspired by the idea of a route, the circularity and centrality of connections that the company puts in place in a physical and symbolic sense. The first reference is to road signs indicating the city centre, linking the icon to the concept of travel: from one town to another, from the suburbs to the centre, or from an outlying place to an interchange hub. Everything travels along a COTRAL path. The rest of the word is delineated in a specially designed typeface.
Other design elements are also part of the identity: the design of bus liveries, interiors, the patterns of upholstery as well as the canopies and poles used on urban and non-urban roads.
More recently, Cotral was entrusted with the management of the railway section that connects Rome to Lido di Ostia and the company has begun renovating infrastructure and rolling stock. Inarea partners COTRAL to defined the introduction of the “Metromare” service and related logo. The latter can be traced back to the identity of the parent system thanks to the direct reference to its colours. This project includes design of train liveries, based on the decision to standardize the entire Cotral non-urban transport system from road to rail.
