A system that keeps working when the person who designed it stops running it.

What was there in 2022

There was marketing, but no marketing structure. A logo here, a campaign there, a booking screen designed by whoever had built it. The company was already successful, and it had been successful without any of this being settled. What was missing was a single line running through the parts.

The brief was not to design something new. It was to bring what already existed under one roof, and to make the roof hold when more was built under it.

The constraint nobody outside the trade sees

A flight consolidator sells other companies' seats. The names on the tickets are not ours, and a brand cannot be built on names you do not own. That rules out the shortcut most travel brands take, which is to borrow the pull of a destination or a carrier.

What is left is what the group does own: how it works, how it looks, and how easy it is to trade with. So the brand had to be built from the inside out, from the operating system rather than from the poster. That is a slower route, and it is the only one available.

One roof, four brands, more than ten products

airtuerk, airtuerk holidays, atBeds, terminal. Three legal entities. More than ten products, several booking engines, different interfaces and different audiences: an agent in Frankfurt, a tour operator in Antwerp, an online travel agency integrating an API.

One identity system had to fit all of them without flattening them. Four rules made that possible:

  • One grid, one typographic scale, one logic for accents. Everything else is allowed to vary.
  • Each brand holds a position in the system rather than a variation of the parent mark. A sub-brand that only differs in colour is not architecture, it is a swatch.
  • Documents are part of the identity. Contract, invoice, signage and deck follow the same rules as the website, because a partner meets the contract more often than the campaign.
  • The interface is not decoration applied to the brand. It is where most partners meet it, so it sets the standard rather than inheriting one.
The brand hub inside terminal, showing logos, print colours, UX colours and downloadable brand assets for airtuerk Service
The brand hub inside terminal. One place where every brand's marks, colours and assets live, so that nobody has to ask which version is current.
Two airtuerk flight content packages standing on white plinths, one white with the wordmark and the line flight content plus 70,000 connections worldwide, one orange labelled summer destinations, selected routes
The same grid and the same typographic scale, carrying two different content tiers. The colour says which tier, the system says everything else.

Continuity of systems, not persons

A brand architecture is tested later, when someone who was not in the room carries it on without asking what was meant.

Variation is fine and necessary. People need room, and a system that forbids improvisation gets worked around rather than followed. What has to hold is the overall picture: a new product, designed by someone who was not there in 2022, should land inside the system without anyone having to correct it afterwards.

That is also the caveat this case carries. An architecture that only holds while I am running it is a habit with good taste, and habits do not survive a handover.

The strategy was set with Ümit Tenekeci and Ahmet Özbek. A brand architecture that reaches across three legal entities does not survive without that backing. Without it, rules are suggestions, and the first deadline overrules them.

What I would do differently

I settled the architecture with four brands in view and roughly ten products in mind. The eleventh product is always the one that does not fit. Every exception since has been an amendment rather than a case the system had anticipated.

I would build the rules from three real products first and generalise afterwards. Rules derived from finished work survive; rules derived from principles get amended within a year.