Making a bus stop catalogue worth opening
Nobody has ever picked up a catalogue of bus stop poles for fun. It gets opened by someone who needs the right part in the right size, and who wants to find it in about ten seconds. That’s the job, and it’s more interesting than it sounds.
I designed and laid out the Externiture Bus Stop Infrastructure Catalogue for 2013 to 2014, working in InDesign and Photoshop.
The cover
The cover is almost entirely black. A single bus stop pole runs down the right-hand side, with the Externiture logo and title at the bottom left. Everything else is empty on purpose. A product catalogue can afford one confident image, and a pole is what the company makes.
Photography treatment
Product photography of street furniture has a problem: it’s grey metal on grey sky. To make the images feel deliberate, I treated them in black and white and let the colour of the signage show through, so the sign itself is the thing you notice.
Product pages and spec tables
The core of the catalogue is the product page. Each one has a clear heading, a short explanation, product images and a specification table with sizes, part numbers and fitting information.
These pages carry the most information, so the layout has to do the work. Two columns of readable copy sit above the product images, and the table sits at the bottom, where a reader scanning for a part number expects it. Order notes and contact details sit in a quiet footer.
Design: the cover, grid, typography and page layouts.
Photography: the treatment and retouching of the product and street photography.
Tools: InDesign and Photoshop.