Rule 54, in Wolfram’s notation, is one of elementary yet complexly behaving one-dimensional cellular automata. The automaton supports gliders, glider guns and other non-trivial long transients. We show how to characterize gliders in Rule 54 by diagram representations as de Bruijn and cycle diagrams; offering a way to present each glider in Rule 54 with particular characteristics. This allows a compact encoding of initial conditions which can be used in implementing non-trivial collision-based computing in one-dimensional cellular automata.