The city of Laval, in Western France, is now only 1 hour from Paris with the new high-speed train. This denotes real progress for this remote town: it has elevated Laval’s name to the status of modern, suburban chic.By investing in transportation, the Lord Mayor aimed to expand the public bus network beyond the town’s boundaries and make it the new face of its community.The design brief demanded a verbal and visual identity to express the daily collectivism of people using the city buses.

We interviewed a commuter on the bus. We summarised their feelings by a series of ‘key-words’.We created a vocabulary with the word ‘Laval’ as a prefix and added a key word to the end. We played with phonetics by putting the article ‘Le’ before each word. We ended by mixing colours with words to create a flow of feeling. We achieved a type of basic, urban poetry that can be continued infinitely.

After the launch, we assessed the Laval bus network with the support of interviewers from universities in Laval. We asked 2 questions to bus-riders:Do you like it?Does it change your opinion of the Lord Mayor?Answers came back as a massive ‘Yes’ for the first question and predominantly ‘No’ for the second one.Hey, what did you expect? That’s politics!