Castle Boulevard – new cycle track

We were commissioned by Phil Jones Associates to provide direction signing guidance and design for an upgraded cycle route along Canal Street, Castle Boulevard and Abbey Bridge in Nottingham.

The Nottingham Cycle City Logo

The Council really wanted to incorporate a new logo into the signs so that the direction signs on their new route had a link to the branding on the Council’s cycle literature. The logo featured a bicycle and so would have duplicated the cycle symbol the direction signs were legally required to include. The signs required something that was ‘corporate’ but gave additional useful information.

Trial number patches

The solution was a Nottingham style number patch identical, except for colours, to the NCN number patches. This sat neatly alongside the NCN patches where both had to be on the same sign face.

Two greens

Colours were very important. The logo had to incorporate things in ‘Nottingham Green’, the pale yellowy green to the left. But certain one-time residents of Nottinghamshire are associated with ‘Lincoln Green’, the darker green on the right. Conveniently both go together well and so could both be incorporated into the number patch.

LTN 1/20 Diagram 13.2

So having sorted out a number patch our attention turned to how to sign the route. If we had the maximum amount of information on each sign they’d all be pretty big. But you don’t need the same amount of information on every sign. You need a lot at major nodes in the cycle network but very little at minor changes of direction. So we produced guidance on how to sign efficiently summarised in the diagram on the left which also appears as diagram 13.2 in LTN1/20 Cycle Infrastructure Design.

Castle Boulevard, Nottingham