IDENTITY PARADE We start a new feature this month in which creative agency The MHD Partnership imagines what sort of livery a defunct operator might adopt were it still around today. It starts with Dart Buses of Paisley. ONCE MORE DARTING ABOUT Benz 608D its longer semi-rural routes for most of Dart’s minibuses, Paisley locals, a move that led Dart to operate the first 20 larger vehicles. of which Another major change came in April/May came from 2001 when Arriva’s 25% shareholding passed Stagecoach. to Stagecoach, which franchised a group of The livery underperforming Glasgow suburban services was dark blue to Dart, which painted some of its buses in its and white, new shareholder’s stripes. with the blue With insufficient revenue coming in to applied to meet costs that included finance payments the front and on most of the fleet, it ceased trading at short skirts. notice, with First stepping in to provide The immediate replacements. Stagecoach took company’s three Marshall-bodied low-floor Dennis Darts name had and reallocated them to Exeter. nothing to For its imagined relaunch of the Dart do with a certain highly successful livery and publicity material, The MHD Dennis single-decker but gave it a non- Partnership has kept three elements of the geographical identity that could take original business: the name; the use of blue the business into other parts of west as the dominant colour; and the idea of buses he MHD Partnership is a creative central Scotland. darting about. agency that specialises in public ‘It suited the idea of direct routes with The blue now covers almost all the bus and transport. It has over 30 years’ minibuses darting around at a high instead of white the second colour is yellow, T experience in creating route and frequency,’ managing director Alistair Mackie for the fleetname and also the roof, which on ticket promotions, service branding, internal told Buses when we profiled the two-year-old most of Dart’s buses was left in their former communication, livery designs, industry business 17 years ago. owners’ colours. The slogan ‘Dart here, reports and franchise bid documents for some A change of strategy in 1997 saw Clydeside there and everywhere’ accompanies pastel- of the UK’s leading operators, including First (soon renamed Arriva Scotland West) acquire coloured map-like lines that emerge from the Bus. a 25% shareholding in Dart and trade some of four letters of the Dart name. ■ It believes that public transport branding, advertising and in particular liveries are way The original Dart identity on Marshall behind most other industries and is keen Capital-bodied Dennis Dart SLF T131 MGB, which became Stagecoach 33782. to promote the idea that they can both look good and be practical, while pushing creative boundaries and remaining recognisable. So to do that, and have a bit of fun, it is producing a series of exclusive designs for Buses, taking a defunct operator from around the UK and reinventing it for the roads of 2015 and 2016. First of these is Dart Buses, the Paisley- based operator that was founded in June 1996 and went into liquidation just over five years later, on 26 October 2001 — the 15th anniversary to the day Britain’s bus services outside London were deregulated. Dart was set up by three former managers of Clydeside Buses — by then part of the British Bus group — with secondhand Mercedes- 56 www.busesmag.com November 2015.