About thirty years ago, Tony DePledge, the Managing Director from Blackpool Transport at the time, asked me to do some ‘Stay Off the Tram Tracks’ posters. He liked our work enough to introduce me to Liz Eznouf, his Marketing Director, which led to our next exciting job – designing a new logo for Blackpool’s buses.The logo was inspired by one of my favourite old typefaces – Gill Sans Standard Bold Extra Condensed, issued by Monotype sometime between 1928 and 1930. The client wanted a fresh take on retro for their new METRO buses. However, like so many great ideas in graphic design, the particular letter combination didn’t look right when the letters of ‘METRO’ were set next to each other. So we had to modify them to look the way they do now. In fact, Liz asked me what the name of the font was, so I told her. I didn’t know what she planned to do with it when she got it installed on her computer, only that she phoned me afterwards and asked why the letters didn’t look right when she typed ‘METRO’.My company’s logo adorned Blackpool buses for a good ten years until there was a major change of management. I was quite proud and knew I’d really made it when my design work appeared on some Corgi toys. The actual graphics for the buses where designed by another firm, whose name escapes me, but they did a great job and had the idea to colour code the buses for the different routes they ran.When asked to do some posters to encourage more people to use buses, I was the perfect person for the job because I didn’t ride them. I’d always seen bus stops empty or with people waiting, and neither image made me want to ride buses. If I saw people waiting, especially in the rain, I wondered how long they’d have to wait, which always seemed too long. And when there was no one there, I didn’t blame people for not wanting to wait. So I phoned Tony or Liz and asked them how long people had to wait between buses, they told me it varied, sometimes every half hour but most times every five minutes. Then it occurred to me that if those ‘waits’ were actually printed on the buses, the waits wouldn’t matter as much. The problem was ‘not knowing’. Tony liked the idea and stuck the waiting times on all of the buses, a trick he used when he ran the bus company in Preston for many years afterwards. You can see an example of a 7-8 minute wait on the double-decker Corgi toy shown below.
