This art installation by the French designer Pierre David, takes a leaf out of Pantone books of yore. Now this is multiculturalism in full flow, in your face, and over the rest of your body too. It reminds me of

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I happened upon this ad for Minnesota's SouthWest Transit, just as the law in Ontario against handheld cellphone use kicks in. The timing is perfect and the advantage that transit offers the multitasking addict is driven home in busloads.image via

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You've got to love Google because they've got the guts, the balls and the brand to do this sort of thing. When a brand is big, it's big-hearted and big-thinking. The occasion here is the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi

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A soupçon of visual punning. A dash of good timing. A gentle invitation to break your fast at Amer.A cracker of an ad for the Ramadan season from DDB Egypt via Ads of the World. Advertising Agency: DDB, EgyptCreative Director

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From time to time Pushing Buses happens on a link or nugget of information or page that just happens to help us all push buses - or trains or LRT. This simple interactive page from the outstanding online mag GOOD,

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Smart, hip and desi, Masala Chai is a steaming cup filled with desi design wit. Check it out. Posts range from an intro to the stellar fold-your-own paper dolls of Mira Malhotra (shown here) to the Madhubani-folk-art-inspired paintings of Arti

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A common sobriquet that describes Chinese Canadians with a job in Hong Kong and a home and family in Canada. The term finds its provenance in the post-1997 phenomenon that saw many Chinese Canadian families set up homes in Canada

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In a campaign that builds off its first spot, posted earlier on Pushing buses here De Lijn continues to promote buses in Brussels as vehicles of social good. It's turning out to be a light (no pun intended), likeable campaign

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Indian English is being a bhelpuri language. It is being sweet and hot and tangy. In a most excellent piece first published in 1987 in the New York Times, Steven Weisman (who was being the Times' New Delhi bureau chief),

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Barrett and Welsh, submitted 5 entries in this year's Summit Creative Awards, an international award show that recognizes the creative work of small/independent agencies. All five entries won. Four of them (2 gold, 2 silver) were for York Region Transit's

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This brilliantly wacky spot for Coke benefits from the fizzy mix of a Bollywoody dance sequence and bhangra homeboy Gurdass Mann's kickass delivery. Arre, chak de!

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An outstanding report from the NYTimes.com, this video on a Pakistani business illuminates, surprises and challenges our preconceived notions of what Pakistan is, whether there is any tolerance in an Islamic context, while celebrating plain old chutzpah and entrepreneurship. It's

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The debate on Chinese script carries on in the pages of the NY Times. Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, professor of Chinese literary studies, Eugene Wang, professor of Asian art, Hsuan Meng, writer at World Journal Weekly and Norman Matloff, computer scientist

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This bold, humanistic spot from Argentina goes where few North American banks dare to go.Viva tolerance! Article and blog: Creative Commons License 2008 Gavin BarrettThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License.

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C'mon folks. Admit you've been here. You've got the t-shirt. Now ask yourself, on which side of the table were you?Article and blog, copyright Gavin Barrett 2009

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"Sweet ride promised in $1.22B streetcars" says the Toronto Star."Bombardier wins massive Toronto streetcar contract" says the Globe and Mail.Yes indeed, this is good news - good news for transit, for manufacturing in Ontario (the new cars will be made

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Brands began as marks burned onto rumps of rawhide.Many brands are still that today, and, often enough, even less than that: just marks minus the life they were imprinted on.The most successful brands step beyond the boundaries imposed by design.Even

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This is a good example of bad advertising that I recently stumbled on. (Tripped over?) What was OC Transpo thinking? A bad visual pun, a poorly executed ad. Tacky. Whoops - did I just say exactly what I felt? My

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As a long-time poet and poetry promoter, I thought I'd use April - being National Poetry Month - to throw the powerful magic of poetry into the rattle-bag that is Bheja Bazaar. Besides, poetry and social commentary have always made

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As a long-time poet and poetry promoter, I thought I'd use the excuse of April to nod at the odd appearance of buses and trains in verse. This excerpt of Philip Larkin's spectacular The Whitsun Weddings begins on board a

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Here's a spot from Brussels that pushes buses in a way designed to appeal to the social animal in all of us. Advertising Agency: Duval Guillaume Brussels, Belgium Creative Directors: Peter Ampe, Bottez Katrien Creation: Hans Kerkhoff, Raoul Maris TV

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Understand a fraction. Know zero. See India Reborn on CBC. Tonight at 8 pm and again at 9.

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A tip of the turban (literally) to fellow ad man, occasional employee and international Sikh Dalbir Singh. His Sikh Park cartoon series reminds us why this successful, industrious community is so much fun to hang with. They know how to

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India just celebrated the incredible, colourful, uninhibited festival of Holi. Enjoy the The Boston Globe's photo essay on the festivities from its spectacular Big Picture website. And in the words of one billion revelers, "Holi Hai!" Let go and let

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A beautifully executed series of peace posters featuring all 12 animals from the Japanese/Chinese zodiac. Shown here, the Ox -it is the Year of the Ox after all. Enjoy. You can find the entire series here.Image by Graflex Directions, via

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This hilarious ad (seen here in situ) from Dublin sells safety with a smile if the reaction of riders is anything to go by. Yay Dublin.Article and blog, copyright Gavin Barrett 2009

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A couple of years ago we were handed a challenging assignment by Viva.They wanted to make university students a core rider group, and make transit a behavioural choice for a new generation or riders. And oh, while doing that, they

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Barrett and Welsh is heading out to San Francisco. Gavin Barrett, Creative Director | Partner, Barrett and Welsh and Pushing Buses author, will be attending the APTA Marketing and Communications Workshop at the Hilton San Francisco Financial District. We're looking

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I'm proud to announce that Los Angeles Transportation Headlines, one of the world's most comprehensive aggregations of daily news on transit, transportation and urban planning, has included Pushing Buses in its Selected Blogs list.Article and blog, copyright Gavin Barrett 2009

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This lenticular poster from Australia promoting safety around rail lines and rail crossings is a perfect match between idea and medium. One second, there's nothing there. The next...Now that's creative that hits you like a train.Article and blog, copyright Gavin

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This 1999 poster from the Underground's advertising archives shows that great brands weren't born yesterday. An evocative precursor to the now well-established Making London Simple positioning, the poster makes the case for the Jubilee line with a single, intelligent sentence

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#3 in my series of Transit Logo Posters. This one's a collection of bus transit logos from around the world - and by no means is it the most comprehensive. As always, if you'd like a high resolution version (for

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Lord Leverhulme rather famously said "Half of my advertising budget is wasted. I just don't know which half."And with that somewhat tautological statement, he set off a craze for measurement and ROI that has, to this day, not found a

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Strategy = I think. Tactics = I do. Strategy = Analysis, planning, ideation. Tactics = Mechanisms, activities, deployment. Strategy - tactics = Einstein's brain in a jar. Tactics - strategy = Einstein without a brain at all. Strategy + tactics

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Over on LinkedIn, a fellow member posted this question, and the answer I sent in might be pertinent to followers of this blog.His question on Multicultural Agencies:Does anyone have any experience working with (as a client) full service multicultural advertising

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In the advertising and media section of today's New York Times, Stuart Elliot features Acela's brand new campaign. In the wake of Amtrak's high-profile celebrity endorsements from the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, its high speed rail service,

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If you are celebrating the Lunar New Year, here's a simple wish from all of us at Barrett and Welsh: may the the Year of the Ox reward all your hard work with abundance and prosperity. Article: Creative Commons License

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Another logo "poster".This time it's a poster of the logos of a few major international rail transit brands.If you'd like a larger version, simply write to me and request a copy.Coming soon, reviews of individual logos and brand identities.Article, poster

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A common sobriquet that describes Chinese Canadians with a job in Hong Kong and a home and family in Canada. The term finds its provenance in the post-1997 phenomenon that saw many Chinese Canadian families set up homes in Canada

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We've been very busy of late, redesigning brands or creating new branding for transit services. The process is usually elaborate and painstaking, and in order to do it right, I've had to traverse the universe of transit and transportation brands

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This exceedingly simple TV spot for German Rail says it all without words. Stille Nacht indeed!Agency (& City): Ogilvy Frankfurt Creative Director(s): Christian Mommertz, Dr. Stephan Vogel Copywriter(s): Dr. Stephan Vogel, Alexander Haase Art Director(s): Christian Mommertz, Kirsten Rosenberger, Marco

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A billboard headline is typically 10 words. Where on earth would an 82 word headline work on a billboard? On a Mumbai street of course, where the traffic crawls. Oh yes, Mumbai gridlock gives you plenty of time to reflect

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Asian American is a catch-all phrase that covers Americans whose origins are East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), South Asian (mostly Indian, and to a lesser extent Pakistani and Bangladeshi), South-East Asian (Vietnamese and Philipino, and to a lesser extent Thai,

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After writing some 10,000 words in this blog, I thought I'd like to see how one of my favourite web services handles the content. Wordle, as some of you may know generates these elegant dense tag clouds of any content

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