Richard Turley gives Air’s identity space to breathe through simplicity and parody

We can all sniff out a pretentious rebrand. You know the clichés – the self pride, the pompousness, the faux inspirational “here’s to the dreamers” – and so does Richard Turley, the creative director behind some of the most anarchistic and forward thinking visual identities of the 2010s. When Air, a creative operations platform, launched its manifesto for new creative environments and began conceptualising a new phase for its brand identity, it knew who it needed for the overhaul. The way forward was this: cut out the corporate fluff, lead with truth and take the absolute piss whilst they’re at it.

It began with serious research, Richard explains. His team travelled and drew hundreds of A’s on every material known to man, exploring every direction until they realised the greatest rebrand was to hardly rebrand. “Because what Air needed wasn’t a new logo. It was a truer one. So, we returned to the idea they had previously decided against (and where we had initially started), but with a fresh perspective,” says Richard. All they needed to do was make Air’s previous A look more like an A than an S. “Now, instead of confusion, we have an A that reflects a more human identity: sensuality, imagination, life. So it’s not just an A, it’s a distilled avatar for the creative practitioners we hope will now subscribe to Air’s unique storage platform,” says Richard.

If it sounds wildly conceptual and even a bit hilarious to rebrand in such a microscopic fashion, maybe that’s part of the point. Air’s new strategy hinges on satire, with a ‘Chief Imagination Officer’ in comedian Kareem Rahma and staged protests against Dropbox, a lot about Air’s rebrand feels born out of inside jokes between creative directors and graphic designers who are exhausted with the theatrics of advertising.

“It’s worth noting that the first version of this new mark was sketched (unironically) on the back of a boarding pass, mid-air, somewhere over the Atlantic. From that moment, it felt destined, like something set in motion beyond us,” says Richard. For all of the humour involved, Air also needed truth. It came with self awareness but also in respect for the brand, so Richard employed changes that were deceptively simple and quietly revolutionary. Using textures inspired by the sky, the universal backdrop, Air encapsulated its entire brand of freshness and freedom in an obvious fashion, diverting from the over-designing that other brands implement. In order to honour Air’s needs for a flexible, organised work space, Richard also diverted from his own fragmented and design heavy style seen in previous projects such as his alternative newspaper Civilization. “Simplicity takes work. It took 30 years of work as a graphic designer to learn that doing the obvious thing isn’t a lack of imagination,” says Richard. “It’s the result of it.”

Codified in a 254-page “brand guidelines” document, Air showcases acceptable moods, emotional gradients, cloud animatics along with disciplines: strategy, typography, atmospheric semiotics. It’s bafflingly thorough but only because you don’t expect this kind of progressive design from the typical brand. “In a world of DAM and cloud storage competitors that are deeply corporate, two dimensional, and candidly, quite dull, we want our creative customer to see themselves in this space,” says Air’s co-founder Shane Hegde. The rebrand is clear-eyed and simply put, airy – condensing tons of information into a weightless form, executing a new visual identity in blatant, relatable ways. And it’s the delicacy of this rebrand that invites a tongue-in-cheek humour about it, just like Kind Bar’s viral logo reveal (which ended up looking magnificently similar to the last logo). Sometimes the really intelligent design choices happen right in front of you whilst you’re too busy looking for the ulterior motive.