Mryntu

Background

Passing one of Germany’s largest cargo stations on a daily basis, I noticed that the design of lorries is quite different from most regular design.
To be frank, it usually strikes me as rather bad.
Recurring features contributing to this impression include:

• low readability, either due to the chosen typeface or backgrounds;


• shadow effects;


• clunky, indistinctive typefaces;


• excessive use of all caps or small caps;


• overly tight or wide letter-spacing;


• a general retro feel (1990s, if I am not mistaken).

There are occasional exceptions from this, but the general trend is striking.

Question

What are the reasons behind these peculiarities of the design of haulage companies? For example:

• Are there any practical reasons for these choices?




• Are these designs aimed at a particular kind of customer (of the cargo companies)?




• Is it a case of intentional cheap design? If yes, why?




• If it is just (unintentional) cheap design, why is this an economic choice? I would expect that if this is a relevant means of acquiring customers, the design would be better. On the other hand, if it is not, I would expect the design being completely home-made¹ or the space being used for advertisement.

If it makes any difference, I am asking about Central Europe here.

^{¹ which could explain some cases, but seems unlikely for some of them}

Examples

Note that most of the following examples were obtained via a trapezoid transform and may not have an exact aspect ratio.

^{Images adapted from the following sources:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7.}

Your images contain lorries which belong to companies (or to their long-time subcontractors) which have established their position a long time ago. Wayback Machine showed the same logos and texts in 15 years old webpages. I guess they have no need to run after design trends. The opposite: Stability can be considered as reliability.

A company (or its subcontractors) have tens or hundreds lorries on the road and they stay there several years. I cannot see any reason why their graphic designs should be different if the company aims to look out big and stable.

A newspaper can change its design more often because quite few watches yesterday's newspapers.

Many answers come to my mind, here are some:

1st – The world of trucking is not at the top of trending in design, I suppose there isn't a great effort to develop a revolutionary graphic image.

2nd – In case of promoting the transport service, the graphic may be ephemeral, only announces the transporting company. The product to be transported can provide its own graphic and impose its inclusion in the trailer.

3rd – If they are promoting the product they transport, the graphic varies (and improves) a lot because could be from the product design team. The image of the product and the company is at stake. In touristic and line buses there are excellent graphics when they don't promote the service but a product.

4th – The trucks are usually from independent drivers and they offer their services to different distribution companies, as far as I know there are no fleets of trucks as in the airlines, so the graphic changes quite regularly. They are usually vinyl superimposed on the trailers.

5th – It's an ephemeral advertising, in a route will not be seen, unless you travel in the opposite direction and see a truck passing by at low speed or stopped at a road break. It's not a static billboard or a screen. Except the small delivery trucks that roam the big cities. In this last case they don't usually promote the transport agency but the product they transport, excepting the renting trucks companies.

6th – I don't know if there's any local type of regulation regarding the distraction in the route, particularly once I was about to have an accident following a sunglasses advertisement on the back of a bus.

7th – On the other hand, at commercial level there's a sub-design style used as a claim. Such is the case of empty billboards, which leaves a lot of blank space to cause horror vacui or take advantage of the "bad design" to call advertising agencies to promote their puroducts in those places. It looks the case of the question examples with telephone number and web site (1 & 6).

Some of these companies are very old family operated, some even tracing back to the second world war or before. Such 'static' companies that are not sold every 5 years to somebody else in the gulf don't need to update their branding every so often and they're not particularly interested in marketing their business. Transport is a long term solid business and they probably get long term contracts which makes marketing not very important to their steady income.

Also, transport business is very open to frequent variation in taxes, fuel price, maintenance and employee demands, so they probably have alot of unpredictable expenses and to keep their profits some may decide to not invest in marketing.