About Busblog

I am a marketer in Seattle, WA. I have a strange obsession with bus ads. All the other fetishes were already taken.

It no doubt has something to do with the fact that I have designed a couple and work in an office with other designers who also create bus ads from time to time. There is nothing quite like seeing your design moving up and down the main street of a major city. In this age of increasingly complicated, bizarre, insidious, high-tech advertising, good old fashion bus ads have not lost their power or commanding presence in the urban landscape. For better or worse, those who create bus ads are like architects of this landscape in a small way. Billboards and other signs shape and often ruin the world around us, but bus ads move among us, demanding our attention with a dramatic flourish, and then rumbling off to their own adventures in foreign neighborhoods, where they are familiar visitors to lots of other people we’ll never know.

Bus ads help fund public transportation, so unlike most urban clutter, they actually do some good simply by covering up a bit of unused space. At their best, they are voices in a living conversation that evolves with the seasons in our city streets, and though most ads clutter our minds and piss us off, I think downtown would be a seem a little quieter and lonelier without them.

And so I set out to document them. I entertain no delusion that this is something original or new to the Internet, or even useful to anybody. But there have been times when I would have liked to see an academic collection of ads to guide me in my own designs and could not find anything. I ride the bus. I walk around them all day. It just seemed inevitable. Even if many sites like this exist already, I am now addicted to the hunt and will probably keep this up as a hobby. My equipment is just a phone camera on my Droid2, the only camera I can practically carry at all times. I’ll do my best to get nice photos, but there will perforce be some blurry shots and odd angles. I am already getting some weird looks. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get threatened or arrested. I’ll be sure to let you know.