How to design bus advertising for each panel

A bus is not one advertising site. It is four or five, each read from a different distance, for a different length of time, by a different person. The rear panel gets minutes of undivided attention from the driver stuck behind it. The side gets three seconds from somebody crossing the road. The interior card gets forty minutes from a bored commuter with a phone in hand. Designing one artwork and scaling it to fit all of them is the mistake that makes bus campaigns look busy and produce nothing.

The rear panel is the one that gets read

In city traffic the vehicle behind a bus is stationary for minutes at a time, three to six metres away, at roughly eye level, with nothing else in the windscreen. This is more attention than any hoarding in the city gets, and it is why the rear panel is the only outdoor format where a phone number earns its place.

Design it like a poster meant to be read, not like a billboard. One headline, one supporting line, the number, and a QR code if the page behind it is worth reaching. Keep the type heavy and the background solid. The reader is in a car with a windscreen between them and your artwork, and a tinted screen kills low-contrast colour combinations.

The side is a three-second read at an angle

The side panel is almost never seen square on. It is seen from a footpath, from an auto, from the next lane, at an angle, while one of you is moving. A word count above six is a word count that goes unread.

So the side carries the name, one claim, and nothing else. Put the message in the upper two thirds, because the lower part of a bus is behind parked vehicles, pedestrians and, from June, a layer of mud. Thin fonts disappear at that distance. Photographs of people turn into grey shapes. A flat colour with heavy type on it beats a beautiful composition every time.

The body is not a rectangle

This is where artwork most often goes wrong between approval and pasting. A bus has rivets, panel joins, a wheel arch, a luggage door with a hinge, and a window line that steps up and down. A face laid across a panel join comes back with a scar through it. A logo centred on a rectangle ends up half on the door.

Get the die-line for the model you have been allotted and design on it. What must stay visible is set by the transport corporation, and the registration number and the destination board are the parts nobody is allowed to cover. Glass has its own rules, which differ between cities, so confirm what your city permits before anyone prints perforated film for the windows.

The inside of the bus is the opposite discipline

Everything above says cut words. Interior cards say the reverse. The rider has a long journey, nothing to do, and a phone in their hand. A coaching centre can print the fee structure. A finance company can print the documents needed. A clinic near the route can print its timings and the nearest stop.

This is also the cheapest space on the vehicle, and it reaches a different buyer from the panels outside: the daily commuter rather than the car owner behind the bus. Write it as a small poster with real information, with the QR code at thumb height.

Print, paste and check

Vinyl for a bus is printed large and viewed far away, so resolution matters less than people expect. What matters is what the process does to fine work. Gradients band. Hairlines vanish. Dark solid colours show every speck of dust within days. Bright, flat colour with a hard edge is what this medium prints well.

Pasting happens overnight at the depot, by a crew working fast on a curved surface, and misalignment is normal rather than exceptional. So go and look. In the first week, photograph your own buses, in daylight, from behind and from the side, at the distance a real person sees them.

For example, a tiles and bathware dealer on Mysore Road takes ten rear panels from the depot serving that corridor. The artwork carries four words, the showroom's name, "opposite the toll", and one number that appears in nothing else the dealer runs. Calls to that number over the three months are the campaign result, and the side panels are left plain because the budget bought reading time rather than surface area.

What to do next

Stand at the junction your buyers pass through. Watch buses go by for fifteen minutes and note which advertisements you could actually read, from behind and from the side. That fifteen minutes will tell you more than any deck.

Then decide the format before the design, because the panel is the brief. Bus advertising covers the allotment, the depot and the pasting, and our guide to what bus advertising costs covers the money side. If you want the artwork and the response route built together, creative and graphic design is the other half of the job, and the free audit is where we check the number on the panel rings somewhere that gets answered.