Double Coin Imaging Awards

It's a side-effect of having trucks with an eyecatching livery that RAC Group director Andrew Boyhan finds amusing.
"We've only got 15 or so trucks….but the fact that they look good and they're out there working all the time, people think we've got hundreds of them!"
RAC is a Christchurch-based company specialising in civil construction work and road transport – heavily involved in the post-earthquake rebuild, infrastructure development and new residential and commercial developments.
Last year, after getting-by with a fleet of secondhand trucks for its first eight or nine years, the company bought its first new trucks – a pair of DAF CF85 truck and trailer tipper units.
It decided that to mark this new-truck milestone, it would upgrade and improve its relatively plain truck livery – a stylish but simple RAC logo in orange, on white cabs.
The RAC directors – with input from transport manager Spock O'Donnell – decided to bypass signwriters for the redesign, opting instead for a dedicated creative design team.
As Boyhan relates, the company hired Marc Wilson's MMW Design to come up with something memorable – the result shown to great effect on the DAFs, which earn RAC the honours as this month's finalist in the PPG Transport Imaging Awards.
The result takes in an orange RAC, angled on the doors of the mostly-white cabs (with orange bumpers), above a giant tyre tread print – also in orange. 
Things are pretty much reversed on the Transfleet tipper bodies and trailers – the bodies in bright orange, the RAC logo in white and the tread prints in silver. Simple….but damn eyecatching!
In the company's brief to the designers, the orange colour was a given, since that's been the colour of the RAC logo since the company was formed about 10 years ago. The tyre tread imaging had also been used previously, as an adjunct to the logo, on truck cabs. 
One of the hardest things, says Boyhan, was matching the company's original orange, because that had been mixed by RAC's inhouse painter for the company's first transporter. 
"But then, when we wanted to replicate it, we couldn't get it right." Finally they found a match and now there is a uniform RAC Orange.
The signwriting, which was done by Academy Signs in Christchurch, includes reflective material for the tyre tread imaging on the bins: "In the evening it reflects in headlights and looks really good."
Unsurprisingly, Boyhan says the company is delighted with the result of the rebrand: "It looks bloody good. We get a lot of very positive comments about it. 
"I don't get overly enthused about trucks, but when I see ours on the road they do look good. 
"I bump into people at a show, a pub, a restaurant or whatever and people comment on how good they look. A lot of people actually praise us for spending money on the livery – because some people don't…..which is stupid, because they're a moving billboard aren't they."
Ask him to sum up the difference between the look of one of the older RAC trucks and one of the DAFs and he says: "Ohh, massive – it is. The comments we get are really quite encouraging. 
"People say 'shit, it looks good on the road.' " That's great, he adds, considering that the trucks "are one of our biggest mediums to advertise ourselves."
It's understandable then that another handful of new trucks bought since the DAFs have all been given the same branding – and by Boyhan's judgment, the two new Isuzus, a UD Quon, two FUSOs and a Volvo FM look just as good.
Now though Boyhan says that the company will rationalise its new truck purchases to just three makes – just as it's been exclusively Caterpillar for its excavators: "All the truck and trailer units will be DAFs or Volvos, and the truck-only units will be Isuzus.
"But the other makes we've already got, we're going to hold onto."
The RAC fleet, which is now split between Christchurch, Auckland, Queenstown, Dunedin and Invercargill, mostly comprises bulk tippers, but also includes a handful of heavy haulage units to shift earthmoving and construction machinery and equipment.