It’s the holiday season, and for those using a particular high street travel agent, they may well walk into the branch under an overlooked reminder of a lost glory of airline travel. The Flight Centre logo still features one of the most unmistakable iconic airliner shapes, that of the Anglo-French Concorde supersonic machine. Remember –…
Tag: Modern
Wing Badges n’ Things
Today we have an accidental product of my job, reporting on aviation preservation worldwide. Relatively recently, two major transport, technology and heritage collections on opposite sides of the world changed their logos. The Shuttleworth Collection, in Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, UK, adopted a newly designed brand logo: I immediately though it seemed familiar (though there was no…
Be Afraid
Today a relatively modern example of the perennial propaganda leaflet encouraging enemy combatants to run away. From the US aimed at Iraq soldiers during the Gulf War of 1991. How effective such propaganda is cannot be shown, as they only really have a role and effect as part of a wider campaign, like much more…
Goats in Clouds
Today’s image; one of the classics – both for the joke, and for the always great effort by the inimitable Gary Larson of The Far Side. ‘Rock stuffed clouds’ are one of aviation’s least good things, and goats are just a cherry on the top of an indigestible desert of a metaphor over extended. As…
Min Scout
Today’s we have a brochure cover that would’ve seemed modern, contemporary when new, but is clearly a product of its time too, with the fonts – the late seventies. It reflects the start of a revolution in aviation, the ultralight. Over to Fiona Shanahan who suggested the story: “Then it was known as a…
Israeli Rainbows
Today’s Poster. “Rainboeing the Skies” (1971) by graphic designer Dan Reisinger introducing the then-new Boeing 747 to El Al Israeli Airlines. Here, in the 1970s, the rainbow design has a different subtext (as well as a frankly cheesy ‘RainBOEING’ pun) to that it would have in a 2019 context, yet as a design it’s clean…
Orange Spit
A modern California fruit shipping box today! Aircraft are regularly used as a marketing differentiator, even where there’s no aviation connection. Here’s is a box for California mandarins, ‘Air One’ (Registered Trademark) brand, which has a monoplane fighter on the box – the five blade prop and curves in the fuselage and wings sort of…
Dutch Diana
A fascinating story here. Decorative art on aircraft (usually called ‘nose art’, though for obvious reasons not quite appropriate here) is nothing unusual, but the story behind this, current scheme is, I think, unique. Plenty of art has been copied, or created for a unit by all sorts of people from unit personnel to Disney…
Top Pun?
A billboard today, with a reference to a rather-well-known aviation film. Taking a steampunk aesthetic (top hats in steampunk, not so much in aviation) for the ‘we’re cool’ that massive companies use in response to the boutique smaller makers. I’m not sure what the pipes under the wings are meant to be, but the first…
Biggin Mug
Today’s art is a graphic text design – on a mug. Through the late eighties airshows I collected a mug a show, as far as I could. Some were specific to the even, or as here to the event and its year. Artistically this Biggin Hill Airshow mug isn’t anything particularly notable, except that such…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 