RPS: three bars and a road surface

When a road is resurfaced, the old surface has to go somewhere. A planer mills it off, and what’s left is a lorry-load of planings: reclaimed asphalt that’s far too useful to throw away.

That’s where Road Planing Supplies comes in. RPS collects planings from highways jobs, recycles them and supplies them back out as material someone else can build with. Haulage, waste management and graded aggregates, across the South and South West of England.

It’s honest, heavy, practical work. The identity needed to be the same.

The mark is three bars, each with a slight curve, stacked like layers of road. Two sit together in Foundation Blue. The third sits above them in green, with a gap underneath.

That gap is the idea. Is the top bar being laid? Lifted? Carried off to somewhere it’s needed more?

It’s a road surface being added, removed or transferred. RPS does all three.

It’s a geometric shape, not a drawing of a lorry or a planer. So it stays readable on the side of a wagon, on a hi-vis vest and at the size of a favicon. And it doesn’t date the moment the fleet changes.

The business is known as RPS on site and Road Planing Supplies on paper, so the logo comes both ways: the initials set big beside the mark, or the full name stacked in three lines to match the three bars.

The clear space around it is measured with the mark itself. One bar’s depth above and below, one on its side to the left and right. No rulers, no percentages, nothing to look up.

Two colours do all the work.

Foundation Blue is the base layer: a deep, slightly green blue for the two lower bars, the type and most backgrounds. Readiness Green is the bar on the move, and it’s the only place the eye is asked to go.

A mark made of layers is easy to extend. When RPS needed two sub-brands, ReadyMix and Concrete, nothing had to be redrawn.

The two blue bars stay exactly where they are. The name goes under RPS, and the top bar changes colour: yellow for ReadyMix, teal for Concrete.

Each one is recognisable on its own (useful when it’s on the side of a mixer). Park them next to each other and they’re obviously one family. And if a fourth name turns up, it needs a colour, not a redesign.