Graphic Design Students Design a New Look for Blue1 Planes
26.05.2010
The Aalto University School of Art and Design and Blue1 Airlines have entered into a partnership for the design of the outward appearance of the company’s airplanes. Blue1 will acquire a new model of plane for its fleet and will at the same time modernise the look of the aircraft one at a time, starting in autumn 2010.
Students from the Degree Programme in Graphic Design and Illustration taking a Business Image Design course came up with ideas for the new concept and visual identity of the planes. Blue1 selected a proposal whose theme was water. The design, entitled Flowing, was authored by Master’s degree student Annukka Saikkonen with Belgian exchange student Magali Abraham.
According to Blue1´s Communications Director Tom Christides, the new look reflects the company’s identity and business solutions.
- Blue1 is a young Finnish challenger airline that believes in courage and new solutions. The fleet’s new image mirrors the principles on which our company is based – Finnishness, purity and lakes – while also communicating the customer orientation and youthfulness of Blue1 as an alternative: air travel for a new era.
Blue1 planes are named after Finnish lakes, and now the aqueous theme is complemented visually. The students made the following comments on the assignment:
- It is not very often that you are asked to design a surface that is more than one thousand times the size of a book cover, or to modernise an item whose appearance has hardly been attended to by any company since the 1960s. This is almost the ideal brief for a graphic designer.
The first of the illustrations conceived by Annukka Saikkonen and Magali Abraham, Spring Rain, will be painted onto a plane’s hull this summer.
Professor Marjatta Itkonen from the Aalto University School of Art and Design is happy about the partnership with Blue1.
- The project offered our students a unique opportunity to apply business image design on an exceptionally large scale.
Christides is also satisfied with the cooperation with Aalto University:
- The School of Art and Design is a pioneer in graphic design in Finland and therefore a natural choice as a partner for Blue1 when carrying out service design for a new generation of passengers. We hope that our partnership with Aalto University can be extended further to other parts of our service chain.
For further information, please contact:
Paula Haikarainen,
Communications and Marketing Manager,
Aalto University School of Art and Design,
paula.haikarainen [at] taik [dot] fi, tel. +358 50 3141 545
Jari Suvanto,
Communications Manager, Blue1,jari.suvanto [at] blue1 [dot] fi (
jari.suvanto@blue1.fi), tel. +358 50 5877 526
