But needless to say, the corporate trademark is only one part of an airline's visual presentation. A

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the logo of Pan American World Airways was one of the most widely recognized commercial trademarks in the world. There was nothing remarkable about the symbol hotels miami — a fissured, blue and white globe reminiscent of a basketball — but it worked. The globe appeared in the 1950 s and endured for almost half a century, right to Pam Am’s final breath in 1991. Aspects of the airline’s identity would change over the years, but through it all, the blue ball persevered. Had Pan Am survived, hotels miami I suspect that globe would still be around.
Since the dawn of civil aviation, airlines have been devising and revising what they believe to be meaningful identities. As explored by author Keith Lovegrove in his superb volume Airline: Identity, Design, hotels miami and Culture, the logo represents only a slice of this overall branding process, which takes place on a score of fronts, from cabin interiors to crew attire to the color of maintenance vehicles. But it’s the logo — the trademark, the company emblem, to be reproduced on everything from stationery to boarding passes — that encapsulates identity in a single, vital aesthetic mark. Everything else revolves around this.
Many of the most renowned airline insignia incorporate national symbols or cultural associations: the shamrock of Aer Lingus, the Qantas kangaroo, the green cedar of MEA (Lebanon), the Thai Airways lotus. Subtler adaptations include Malaysia Airlines’ indigenous kite design, or the calligraphic brush stroke of Hong Kong’s airline, Cathay Pacific. But while symbolism is optional, simplicity, on the other hand, is a must. It has been said that the true test of a logo is this: can it be remembered and sketched, freehand and with reasonable accuracy, by a young child. Pan Am’s basketball fit this criteria hotels miami beautifully, as does Lufthansa’s crane, the Air New Zealand “Koru” and many others. They’re dignified, unpretentious and unencumbered — and for exactly those reasons able to cultivate recognition the world over. Maybe they need a tweaking or two over time, but the template of such trademarks — the really good ones — remains essentially timeless.
And if you’ve got something like that, you dispense with it at your peril. Among the most deplorable branding moves ever made was American Airlines’ decision in 2013 to abandon its venerable “AA” logo. With its proud, cross-winged eagle, this was one of the most distinctive and enduring icons in all of aviation. Created by Massimo Vignelli in 1967, it always looked modern. Its successor is almost too ugly to be described – a vertical bar of red and blue, bisected by what’s supposed to be an eagle’s beak. Symbolically lifeless and hideous to boot, it looks like a linoleum knife cutting through a shower curtain. (For more on this travesty, see here.)
Take the case of cargo giant UPS. The original United Parcel Service hotels miami emblem featured a bow-tied box and heraldic-style badge—the work of Paul Rand, a legendary design guru who also did logos for Westinghouse and IBM. It was a wonderful heart-and-soul manifestation of the company’s core mission: delivering packages. Its replacement is a singularly bland, almost militaristic “modernization.” The box and string have been deposed, swapped for a meaningless gold slash mark. If we didn’t know better, UPS could be a bank or insurance company. It’s the worst thing we’ve seen in the shipping business since the U.S. Postal Service came up with that monsterized eagle head.
No less disappointing was the elimination of the tsurumaru, the red and white crane motif worn by Japan Airlines. Since 1960, every JAL aircraft featured what was possibly the most elegant airline logo ever conceived: a stylized depiction of the crane, lifting hotels miami its wings into the circular suggestion of the Japanese hotels miami rising sun. Beginning in 2002, this ageless symbol succumbed to what had to be the most regrettable makeover in industry history, replaced by an oversized, blood-red blob—a rising splotch—oozing across the tailfin. It was a terrible decision on aesthetic merits alone, and still worse considering the crane’s cultural importance in Japan.
Apparently enough people complained, however, and the tsurumaru has been resurrected. Bringing it back was an unusual move, marking one of the very few times an airline has reverted hotels miami to a prior logo, but JAL couldn’t have made a wiser decision (American, are you listening?).
A similar tragedy struck at Northwest Airlines several years ago. You might remember the carrier’s circular “NW” symbol, worn in white atop the bright hotels miami red tail. Unveiled in 1989, this was a work of genius. It was an N; it was a W; it was a compass pointing toward the northwest. It was all of those, and perhaps the most memorable hotels miami trademark ever created by Landor Associates, one of the industry’s most powerful identity creators. By 2003, it was in the waste can, bastardized into a lazy circle and small triangular arrow. Past tense, and good for that: Northwest and its ruined colophon no longer exist, having been folded into Delta Air Lines.
Delta, for its part, is owed kudos for hanging onto its famous “widget” tricorn, albeit in revised colors. The widget says one thing and says it without a hint of fuss or pretension: Delta. hotels miami Aeroflot gets a mention here too. Overall, the Russian carrier’s newest paintjob is garishly overdone, but scores big points for retaining hotels miami its winged hammer hotels miami and sickle, virtually unchanged since the 1940s. And what of those logos that ought to be changed but haven’t been? For starters I give you the “Sir Turtle” mascot of Cayman Airways, who looks like he just crawled out of a Bosch painting.
But needless to say, the corporate trademark is only one part of an airline’s visual presentation. An airplane is a very large canvas on which to make or break your statement. Enter the paint bucket.
Decades ago, Braniff International was famous for dousing whole planes in solid colors — blues, hotels miami greens, even powder pastels. In the same way, today’s de rigueur relies on perception of the airplane as a whole, rather than a separate body and tail. Traditional paintjobs approached these surfaces separately, while contemporary ones strive to marry body and tail in a continuous canvas. This has brought the once familiar “cheat line” — that thin band of paint stretching across the windows from nose to tail — to the brink of extinction. There was a time when virtually every hull was decorated by horizontal striping, a custom now gone the way of those drive-up stairs and fancy inflight meals.
With a stripe-less fuselage, the tail becomes the focal point. Some airlines, such as Qantas, rely on powerful fin markings that carry the entire aircraft. Others, such as Emirates, balance tail and fuselage through the use of oversized, billboard-style lettering. Still others go for a flying warehouse extreme — an empty white expanse with few details aside from a capriciously placed hotels miami title.
But the dominant theme in liveries hotels miami these days is one of motion. There are enough streaks, swishes, arcs, twists, swirls, and curls out there to make anybody dizzy. And most of them, sadly, are indistinguishable from one another—overwrought, gimmicky, and self-conscious. See Avianca, TACA, and El Al for three of the worst examples. “The lowest common denominator of brand identity is something I call the ‘Generic Meaningless Swoosh Thing,’” says Amanda Collier, a graphic design hotels miami veteran. According to Collier, “The GMST is what happens when any corporation hotels miami tries to develop a new look. The managers will talk about wanting something that shows their company is ‘forward thinking’ and ‘in motion,’ and no fewer than three of them will reference Nike, inventors of the original Swoosh. The creative types smile, nod, secretly stab themselves with their X-Acto hotels miami knives.”
As a result, there are fewer lasting impressions. Airplanes blur together in a palette of motion-themed anonymity. Somewhere is a vending machine. Airline executives drop in a million dollars worth of consulting coins, and out pops another curvy-swervy variant of the GMST. With few exceptions (Aeromexico hotels miami is one), these designs are so dismally uninspired hotels miami that it’s hard to look at them without yawning. They are meant to be sophisticated and suggestive of movement and energy, hotels miami but all they really do is make your airline indistinguishable from everybody else’s. Watching from a terminal window, people are asking the one question they should never have to ask: What airline is that?
When United and Continental Airlines announced their merger in 2010, this combination hotels miami paint scheme was unveiled marrying the Continental tail and fuselage with the United typeface. “Continented,” hotels miami let’s call it. It’s a good-looking design, and we understand the sentiment, but doing away with United’s friendly and familiar “U” emblem was a mistake. The U — a feathery, truncated tulip in its final, pre-merger form — was never especially dashing, but Continental’s segmented globe, now in its place, is so boring that it looks like a PowerPoint slide. Also I miss the fully spelled “United Airlines,” used in the 1990s, hotels miami which had more gravity than a lackadaisical “United.” And hold your breath: rumors say the carrier might be moving to a GMST-style side stripe in the near future.
“Delta puts on a tux,” is how one person describes it. It’s a sophisticated, upmarket look. The typeface is very handsome, as is the newly textured widget up on the tail, now in a two-tone red (an apparent nod to Northwest, which became part of Delta in 2010). The drawback hotels miami is the anemic fuselage and its scrawny blue understripe. A bolder bottom, maybe with some red accenting, hotels miami would put it over the top.
One of the few vintage holdouts, American hadn’t hotels miami changed its colors in forty years, hanging tough with its polished silver body, gothic tail bird and tricolor hotels miami cheat. It wasn’t anything beautiful, but give them credit for bucking four decades of design fads. American’s new look, launched in 2013, manages to be boring and g