The Wings of the Crane, 50 Years of Lufthansa Design

Text in English and German. The basic features of Deutsche Lufthansa's present corporate image emerged almost 45 years ago. It was created by Otl Aicher, one of the principal figures at the now legendary Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. Another work by Aicher that spoke to the whole of Germany, as it were (and still does, in rudiments), is the 1972 corporate image for the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. The corporate image he created for the Olympic Games in Munich, which made an essential contribution to the ambience of the event, has also remained memorable. Since the ideas developed by Aicher and his colleagues were implemented in the early sixties, the airline has been seen world-wide as a perfect example of a consistently developed corporate image. Aicher based himself on ideas from the Deutscher Werkbund and took the company's entire inventory into consideration: "house colours, pictorial and typographic logos, typeface, graphic and typographic rules and standards, photographic style, quality of support materials, packaging, exhibition systems, architectural characteristics, forms (design) of interior furnishings and equipment, style of work and service clothes". As well as Otl Aicher, numerous other product and graphic designers, fashion designers and advertising and marketing agencies have worked for Lufthansa. They include Otto Firle, whose ideas led to the crane logo, Hartmut Esslinger and his company frog design, Priestman & Goode, Müller Romca Industriedesign, Don Wallance, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Hans Theo Baumann, Nick Roericht, Wolfgang Karnagel, Topel & Pauser and the bhar design practice, fashion designers Uli Richter, Ursula Tautz and Werner Machnick, Jürgen Weiss, Gabriele Strehle and the Jobis company as well as the agencies Zintzmeyer & Lux, the Peter Schmidt Group, Ogilvy & Mather, Young & Rubicam, Spiess/Ermisch/Abel, Springer & Jacoby, McCann & Erickson and Fanghänel & Lohmann. An exhibition of the same name at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt deals with the same subject as the book.