The brand turned 100. The book had to look it​.
Nine truck tires. Three kinds of road. A typeface of their own. One centennial year. General Tire’s 2015 data guide is a reference book for fleet buyers and dealers, and it landed in the year the company marked a hundred years in business. It had to work as a spec manual and still carry that weight.
28 pages
cover, thirteen spreads and a back cover, all in one system
Nine tires
steer, drive and trailer positions across highway, regional and off-road work
One shape
the chevron from the GT mark, built into every page
Pages 8–9. Steer and drive tires face each other across the gutter, each with its axle position, applications and full spec table.
The challenge.
General Tire is part of the Continental family, but it has an identity of its own: the red, the GT mark, and a display typeface made for the brand that nobody else can use. It sets the headlines, tire names and labels, and the body copy and tables run in a separate text face that pairs with it. The guide had to look like General, sit comfortably beside the rest of the Continental line, and mark the centennial without turning into a souvenir.
The content works against all of that. Nine tires that look almost the same in a photo. Spec tables seventeen columns wide, with load range, tread depth, speed, diameter, rim widths, dual spacing and maximum loads at inflation. Then the load and inflation tables and the safety warnings, which every guide has to carry and nobody opens until something goes wrong.
Every truck tire is round and black. The axle is what’s different.
The idea.
Organize the book the way a buyer shops. Fleet buyers don’t start with a model name. They start with a job, like a tire for the drive axle of a truck that runs regional routes. So the guide opens with an application guide that crosses axle position with type of work, and every product page answers the same two questions before anything else: which wheel, and which road.
Then take the shape from the logo and make it the structure. The chevron in the GT mark became the frame for every product spread, with the tire set in the red band and the applications sitting where the chevron points.
The chevron is the grid.
Grey chevron above, red band below, tire in between. It repeats on every product spread, the inside cover and the back cover.
Axle at a glance.
A small truck icon on each page highlights the wheel position in red, next to a swatch of the tread pattern. You can find the right tire without reading a word.
A hundred years, quietly.
The centennial badge sits on the cover, and “100 Years of Reliability” runs in every folio. It shows up on every page but never takes the page over.
The data guide
The front of the book answers the question before the product pages do. The table of contents shows every tire’s face, so a dealer can find one by sight. The application guide sorts the line by axle and by highway, regional or off-road use. The availability chart lays every tire against every size, with load range and tread depth in 32nds where they meet.
Each of the three sections opens on a full-bleed black and white photograph: a tractor-trailer on an open highway, a box truck in regional traffic, a loaded logging truck coming off a dirt road. The year runs vertically down the page and the section name is set large across it. The product spreads follow in pairs, with steer and drive tires facing each other, so a reader sees the matched set.
The spec tables were the hardest part. Seventeen columns on a letter page meant setting the headers on an angle, shading alternate rows and flagging the maximum load at inflation in red. Every table uses the same column order, so once you can read one, you can read all nine. The load, inflation and safety pages at the back get the same red and grey treatment as the product pages, because they have to be read too.
The sell sheets
Alongside the guide, I designed single-product sell sheets for the line, so a sales rep could leave one tire’s story behind instead of the whole book.
A hundred years of reputation, organized by axle.
ROLE: Design and layout of the 2015 Truck Tire Data Guide and single-product sell sheets for General Tire, a Continental brand. Original guide 2015.