paytonc

Alas, goodbye to the tulip, invented by Saul Bass logo* years ago, and now here's their chance to reprise that. In the same vein, perhaps UA can point out to CO that they closed a CLE hub back in the 1980s.

Color me unimpressed with CO's font: the serifs are too chunky and the x-height too tall, both of which make a didone font look squat instead of slim. "United" hasn't been rendered in mixed case since 1973, either (and as if to make a point of it, that initial U sports a clunky, pointless stem as if it were lower-case), and hasn't seen serifs save for the 1990s small-caps (grey+pinstripes planes) era. The font's fussy details wash out over the 20 characters in "Continental Airlines," but really jump out when looking at the six in "UNITED."

Alas, again, I doubt that kind of attention to design will survive. Take a look at CO's graphically blunt advertising: all-caps condensed headlines, underlines (which might've been appropriate for adding emphasis back in the days of typewriters but not today), high contrast colors, no photography or illustration besides the globe in the corner. Quite different from UA's almost too elegant, soft-sell approach of spare watercolor illustration, in greys and pastels, set against lots of whitespace. In fact, CO's ad agency deliberately contrasts its "simple, straightforward style" branding against "the flowery imagery of typical airline ads."

Colors: at least the blues weren't all that different to begin with, and I could be convinced that the red/white/blue, dating back to UA's days as a mail carrier, is a bit nationalistic. I remember reading somewhere that in duopoly markets, one brand chooses red (Delta, Colgate, Coca-Cola, TWA, US Republicans, UK Labour/Can Libs) and the other chooses blue (United, Crest, Pepsi, Pan Am, US Democrats, UK/Can Tories). I don't know where that leaves American.

Good catch -- another subtle way to virtually extend the brand's global reach? (And yes, Copa/AeroRepublica adopted CO's branding and OnePass back when CO went on its colonial phase.) A ploy to get Copa to hurry up and join *A?

Not sure if he's spoken today, but he strongly endorsed the idea in 2006:
"Continental and United are two companies that ought to get together and win the game decisively... You put these two companies together, it's called checkmate."

* I remember wondering as a kid why it was that CO, AT&T, Minolta, and possibly others looked so alike in their stripery. Now you know!