GO Transit - Logo and Brand

Logo and Brand

The GO Transit brand has remained largely unchanged since the agency was founded. The design was created by Gangon/Valkus, a Montreal-based design firm that was also responsible for the corporate identites of Canadian National and Hydro-Québec. The firm’s team wanted to create a unified logo using the initials of the Government of Ontario (‘GO’), via two circles with a ‘T’ incorporated into it. Lead designer Frank Fox described the creation of the logo as “a happy accident. More or less, we had this feeling among us that this couldn’t be true. We went off trying many other solutions, but nothing else was good enough.”

The logo has since become woven into the cityscape of Toronto, and an prominent identifier of the agency. As one graphic design expert stated, it achieved “an enviable goal that most graphic designers strive to accomplish with any logo they design.” Only one minor revision was made after the original version was unveiled: while the ‘G’ and ‘O’ used to touch each other, a gap now exists with a bolder white ‘T’ to enhance them. The logo’s colour, known as “GO Green”, is the primary corporate colour used on all vehicles, signage, and printed material.