Tar + Gravel’s personality revolves around a modern, boutique style take on the classic neighborhood bike shop while maintaining a friendly, inviting, relaxed atmosphere. Branding needed to communicate this to both professional and hobby level cyclists. It also needed to represent a home to products and services that cover both road and mountain biking.
The final logo is an abstraction of road signage that cyclists might encounter along their journey. The rough line work signifies the nature of the road as a rider transitions from city road to mountain trail. The ‘A’ that the two words share is missing it’s crossbar to represent a perspective view of the road ahead or a mountain peak. The two words join to form a ‘+’ aligning with the decision to replace all occurrences of the word ‘and’ in the company’s communication. This decision was made to represent the dichotomies of road and mountain biking and professional and hobbyists.
