A few years ago I flew with Lufthansa Airlines and apart from the quality service what really stuck with me was their branding, it is highly consistent across all platforms, it’s orderly, you can tell that each time the logo was used it was well calculated and advised, it is treated with respect, exactly how branding should be by definition. The crane in flight, was created by Professor Otto Firle in 1918, it has stood the test of time and in some way has set a standard for how airline logos look today.

A short time ago I was cycling around Amsterdam when I spotted the offices of Surinam Airways and invariably their logo. I stopped the bike to take a closer look at its resemblance to the Lufthansa logo. A couple of weeks pass and I see another airline logo, this time it’s Air India; once again it had characteristics of the Lufthansa bird. After this I began to think more about familiarity within design, there are predefined rules and expectations for nearly every single piece of design out there. When these expectations aren’t fulfilled we can easily feel lost and uncertain. If we are going to change convention it needs to be replaced with something better. There is a very fine line between hitting the right visual note or succumbing to tiresome solutions or in some cases direct copying. I cannot stand plagiarism, it is totally inexcusable; however in this article I am discussing the influence of convention as opposed to stealing. Personally I find many of these airline bird logos to be highly generic and very forgettable. Design with the expectations of the end user in mind is crucial, if it is a box of cereal it needs to look like a box of cereal. On the contrary preconceived notions and ideals can easily play too much of a role in determining the final solution all the while forgetting about innovation and creativity.

It is important for a logo, particularly in the service industry to communicate the service of the company. Birds fly, as do planes, it’s an obvious connection which communicates exactly what it needs to. At what point does designing by convention or common rhetoric become a lazy or boring solution. Design conformity is something that I struggle with on every single project I work on, convention makes it very had to try something drastically new or different, we need and want to feel familiarity. Trying to change convention can easily result in confusion if we’re not careful. If The New York Times decided to change it’s title header type it would no longer be The New York Times. It’s possible to dramatically change things, so long as the change is for the better, but as usual change will met with resistance.

I recently attended a seminar on way-finding, we were introduced to fundamentals, theories and logical reasoning behind way-finding decisions. Way-finding diagrams rely a lot on the convention of urban-planning maps and educated guessing, a green patch on a map means grass, a blue patch translates to water and a gray block is read as buildings; these are not rules but rather elementary standards which define how we approach such a task. We feel comfortable when we see what we know, disregard these expected standards and you better have a superior alternative. We feel comfortable buying a blue carton with a white splash on it as we know it’s milk, even if we can’t read a word on it, mix up the colours and you’ve got a different product. Convention is useful and unavoidable, most of the time it exists because it works but it can nearly always be improved on. As designers this is where we come in, to improve what is already there. This leads me full circle back to the airline logos, they are conforming to the basic idea of a bird in flight but are failing to improving on the concept, all the logos begin to look the same without any clear distinction between each of them.

From a customer point-of-view some of these logos are so similar that in most cases they could be interchanged with one another, there is very little distinction between them. We see this in many areas of design, people who conform to preexisting standards for no reason other than feeling safe, afraid to take risks because they know what has worked, not thinking about advancing but rather freezing in a moment scared to break the mold. The thought of failing is too much to worry about so they settle on the safety of tried and tested design, this way of working will only lead to blind ignorance and tiresome solutions. On your next project try something very different, open up and see what happens. Take a risk.