With Madmen closing up shop and TV series PanAm a distant blip on our radar, we designers will have to look elsewhere to satisfy our appetite for experiencing advertising’s heyday and the budding airline industry that came of age alongside it.
A new book, Airline Visual Identity 1945 – 1975 from Callisto Publishers, just might help with that hunger. The beautiful tome glorifies not only flying’s golden age, but the ways in which the airlines were visually presented to the world.
With samples of print ads, flyers, posters, boarding cards, and on-board branding, this stunning compendium showcases the big players in the airline industry as well as the advertising world. In the emerging jet age, the brands of PanAm, British Air, United, and Continental—to name just a few—were showcased for the public through the artistry of Massimo Vignelli, Ivan Chermayeff, Saul Bass, and others. In addition to the visual feast, Airline Visual Identity also discusses the history and vision of the airlines it features.
This coffetable book will need a very sturdy coffeetable on which to sit, as it weighs in at over 14 pounds and 436 well-appointed pages. The book is a tasty delight from a printing standpoint as it uses seventeen different colors, foil and embossing throughout, and five varnishes to bring the visual identities to life.
The book’s regular price tag of $400 will give some folks a case of sticker shock. But the level of print detail and the comprehensive research that went into the book will undoubtedly convince fans of great design, mid-century advertising, and air travel to splurge.
This article was last modified on April 14, 2015
This article was first published on April 14, 2015
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