Solo Advanced Vehicle Technologies was a transportation startup delivering a purpose-built heavy truck platform for autonomous driving. Its goal was to bring modern vehicle technology to a legacy industry to deploy autonomous trucks safely and effectively.
I coined the name Solo and added Advanced Vehicle Technologies. I designed and managed the S shield logo, the Solo wordmark, and the rest of the brand package. I also designed secondary logos like the SD1 Heavy and Building the Future Truck.
Bold
Futuristic
Proactive
Solo AVT was an autonomous heavy truck technology company with the goal of putting a heavy truck on the road designed to be completely driverless. The trucks would, in effect, "drive solo," which is where the name comes from.
The S Shield Logo was conceptualized to be the emblem on the front of a front. It's big and bold, like the brand's voice, communicating a sense of strength and security for the vehicle, its cargo, and those around it.
Advanced Vehicle Technologies, often shortened to AVT, was added to the name to help make it clear to investors and early customers that the company was, in fact, building technology for advanced vehicles.
Solo's technology was the bottom part of the truck and was engineered to work for multiple types of transportation. When naming the showcase truck, we came up with "SD1" (or Solo Driver 1) for the platform name and "Heavy" for the type of truck. Future extensions of the truck platform brand could have seen "SD1 Light" and "SD1 Portage" and future platforms bearing the name "SD2."
When setting out to imagine what the SD1 Heavy could look like, we designed a truck that would easily fit into the worlds Syd Mead created: bold, futuristic, and a bit glamorous. It was also crucial that the SD1 Heavy carry the brand identity into physical form, even if these vehicles never existed.
The Solo AVT brand came to life across the company's offices in Fremont, CA.
For its first on-track testing– an event that would serve as an early showcase for investors and customers, and be filmed– I created a fun sub-brand for the engineers and testing team that was drawn from the team's collective love for Back to the Future. The Building The Future Truck logo was on t-shirts, hats, and even on the test truck itself. This showed how the company could expand its brand languages by going entirely outside of the brand box.
