United757

Okay 10 minutes in photoshop landed me with these 4 slight variations which look much better IMHO:

DCAmateur

The livery feels a little too first-draft. It's like someone deleted "Continental" on their design program and typed in "United," and left it at that. The whole things seems awkward. Hopefully the airlines recognize the marketing importance of truly integrating their branding to create a joint CO/UA look. Especially since United's brand is much better known internationally.

MP Premier

+1, Well stated.

Exleftseat

+1. Reminds me of the Boeing/McDonellDouglas merger. The merged company kept the Boeing name, but is using the MDD logo. Shows respect and is not liek the DL/NW merger, where DL spend so many efforts to remove everything and anything reminiscent of NW. I think, this is a good start. I remain cautiously optimistic.

lixiaojuventus

EXACTLY! United caught my very first attention just by way of those nice, lovely watercolor artwork! I thought a company willing to design those arwork must be very interesting and then began to learn more about her~

holtju2

The CEO's probably had couple of adult beverages and were playing with the Photoshop to see how United and Continental elements could be merged. I truly hope that they had used some professional branding consults for this. The new logo ensemble is just terrible.

dliesse

It's fun to speculate on and discuss the livery, but when it comes down to it, I really don't care what's on the outside of the plane. It's what's inside that counts!

mechteach

You have to turn on the picture viewing option in your profile. Alternately, you could go to http://s1025.photobucket.com/albums/y311/mechteach1/ .

us2

I don't particularly care for what they came up with, but from a business perspective, I think it makes sense for the short-term at least. What people are complaining about are the two easiest parts to revise later at low cost. This gets the CO planes in the air with the United name quickly and cheaply; the only needed change painting over "Continental" with "United". That said, I think this would look better had they gone with "United Airlines" rather than the shorter "United".

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!

Bonehead

I absolutely love the one on the lower left. I was trying to figure out where a tulip should go, and that seems to be perfect to me.

HeathrowGuy

Oh, I don't mind a change in the font to UNITED. Would prefer it, actually, and will shoot off a polite email to CO Customer care on that issue - at the very least, I'd like the U capitalized on the current conception for a cleaner look. But the Golden Globe stays - the era of the hammer and sickle, er, tulip is over. Same logo/livery = same sh!t in legacy United thinking, so Smisek had to take a stick to that mentality from the very beginning with this merger.

N1120A

Its awful. Terrible. Bush League. Smacks of being rushed.

The new(ish) United colors are among the best in the sky. The new carrier should have adopted something from that. Perhaps adopt the tulip on the tail into a world map with gold, then change the tulip colors on the front from the Saul Bass colors to blue and gold. Then keep the current United font, which is absolutely stunning.

pdquick

Hate it.

It just creates cognitive dissonance. It looks like somebody grabbed the wrong stencil for a Continental plane.

Steph3n

Go to the Co boards and check it out, there is almost 100% unity on the font being bad and better as UNITED in the UA font, or 'United Airlines' on the aircraft if the same font is used, but preferable with the UNITED and UA font, maybe even the ole U logo as the capital U