Air Europa, one of Spain's major airlines, decided to launch a new website and app to support their services in 2014. As they were being built by Madrid's agency Hanzo, they commissioned me to design a set of icons which would help illustrate the sections for customer information. These icons should primarily work as independent elements to be used by the agency on their own layouts, but a couple group compositons were also comissioned for homepage banners.
The client's briefing was to create a clean and flat language using the brand's color palette; minimalistic icons based on geometric shapes that would be easy to identify by any international customer, but with enough charm and personality to add character to the site.
I chose a style which tried to fit somewhere in between contemporary iconography – vector drawings with fat strokes and round edges – and classic illustrations from the golden age of American Airlines – 50s/60s bold 'n pop illustration –.
The first round of icons was a collection of smaller ones designed specifically to fit in banner compositions. The 'rules' of this first round of icons (the angles in corners, some basic shapes, the thickness of the strokes, pattern repetitions, etc.) would later apply too to the bigger icons set.
This first set of icons included mostly elements considered as luggage or cargo, "stackable items", since this was one of the main topics featured in customer information pages.
This first set of icons included mostly elements considered as luggage or cargo, "stackable items", since this was one of the main topics featured in customer information pages.
The second round of icons was a collection of bigger pieces. Here, each icon had to have enough weight on its own to work as an illustration. Nevertheless, I designed the icons as compositions of even smaller elements. That way, the agency could later on extract these smaller icon-elements and make their own compositions (if they felt so inclined).
Finally, down here you can see some examples of the icons in context. These compositions were designed by Hanzo, the amazing agency in charge of the whole project (more on Air Europa's site).
The project won two gold LAUS design awards in 2014. Thank you, guys!
