Old Southwest logos.
Southwest Airlines has always been the brightest airline carrier in the United States, literally, with its blue, red and yellow aircrafts. Its colorful personality has served the brand well over the years as the largest domestic low-cost carrier, with a loyal customer base. However, in recent years, competing low-cost airlines with new attitudes have gained traction in an already crowded marketplace, so Southwest hired Lippincott to refresh the brand identity and help the airline get back to its roots.
“Southwest had already taken a very careful look across the brand and they realized that they were presenting themselves in a fragmented way,” says Rodney Abbot, senior design partner on the project. Southwest had two logos that were being used for separate purposes. One logo was a drawing of a plane ascending over the Southwest name that was used in marketing communications, while the other logo, a heart with wings, was utilized throughout the customer experience.
“They were supporting two different identities and not getting great traction from a pure branding standpoint,” Abbot says. The bright colors of the brand were also disjointed when used as an identifier. The advertising, for example, tended to be predominantly yellow, whereas the planes themselves were primarily blue and red.
Abbot and his team at Lippincott took a close look at the brand to come up with a strategy that would align the visual assets with the mission of the company. “It was really about getting potential customers to take a first look at Southwest, as well as maintaining the loyalists they already have. There are many customers who are passionate about Southwest, and we wanted them engaged and excited about where the company was headed. We wanted to make the identity fresh and modern without losing its heart, so to speak,” he explains.
Old Southwest logos.
“So from the very first meeting we said the heart would be the centerpiece—the one truly iconic symbol and story that only Southwest could own and deliver on.”
—Rodney Abbot
The design team explored many different ways to present the heart, including a heart in motion. Abbot says, “The a-ha moment for us was when we started to explore the balance between the tricolored stripes—which is a core element in the Southwest visual identity system—with the heart. When we brought these two elements together, everything fell into place.”
Of course, you can’t just plop a heart on a plane and expect people to love it. Lippincott learned that the red belly of the plane was really symbolic to Southwest employees. It represented a warrior spirit that has been in the brand’s DNA since the beginning, when the founders had to fight for the right to start the airline carrier in the early 1970s. “Because the red was about passion, we didn’t want to lose the story, so putting the heart on the belly of the plane was an important part of maintaining that story. To keep the potency and fly with heart was part of the experience, and hopefully it means more to people now, because it has more clarity, and it’s easy to understand,” Abbot explains.
The heart is also present by the door as customers enter the plane. “Most airlines typically will put the symbol on the tail really big. We liked the idea of using the heart very small by the door,” he says. “That idea of using the heart as a punctuation and discreet element was a very important part of the story. In the past, the heart was part of the iconography and came across as sentimental and cute. The new image is much more professional and polished, and it’s used in a very deliberate way to communicate the unique qualities of the brand.”
In addition to the heart, the planes were repainted in a glossier, more saturated finish, with blue as the primary color, and a new logotype was developed for the Southwest name, which now appears boldly on the fuselage across the windows, instead of on the tail. The visual characteristics of the heart and new logotype also informed the design of Southwest Sans, a custom typeface that is now used in all brand communications.
The iconic heart logo has been adapted to all materials including packaging, pins and digital and print materials. When the campaign was rolled out in the fall of 2014 at Dallas Love Field, Southwest’s hub, it was well received, and the accompanying ad describes it best: “Without a heart, it’s just a machine.”
Early sketches of the logo take on many forms and even indicate movement. The Lippincott team eventually focused on the angle of the stripes on the plane tail and carried that into the heart symbol.
Once the heart logo was established, the Lippincott team worked with the colors, taking the stripes off the tail design and putting them into the heart.
Southwest Sans came from the heart, literally. It was crafted taking cues from the characteristics of the new logo, using the point and base of the heart and the rounded letterforms.
The new planes feature the Southwest name across the fuselage and feature deeper, more saturated paint colors.
The old planes maintained a red belly that indicated a warrior spirit, which was part of Southwest’s legacy. The Lippincott team felt that replacing the red belly with the heart would have more impact symbolically. The heart was also placed next to the plane door, reinforcing Southwest’s commitment to its customers.
The final identity rollout as seen on packaging, pins and in the Southwest terminal.
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