FastJet, the new low cost airline poised to take over Africa, spearheaded by Stelios, founder of easyJet, and the Fly540 airline team has launched their new brand look. The brand uses bright yellow and orange colours (but of course!) with a modern african triangular pattern and giant grey parrot head that appears on the tail fin. The brand seems to have the visual cues of both Porter Airlines (trade parrot for racoon) and colour and textual treatments of Vueling. It has to be said, this branding goes against everything low-cost branding used to stand for. That’s why we, here at DesignAir, love it!
Cheap flights don’t have to mean cheap branding, and fastjet has taken a fun, modern, clean route and doesn’t shout their name at the top of their voice. It seems they have completely U-turned over their first artists impressions and embraced a more complete brand, with mascot which gives their marketing material depth, tone of voice and character. The colours are bright and noticeable, the imagery strong and identifiable, and the parrot even has some design sense to it. Let’s just not hope for a parrot bird strike. The headlines would pretty much write themselves.
Chief Executive Ed Winter mentioned “The African Grey is renowned for its intelligence and is therefore a perfect personification of fastjet’s motto; smart travel. We are delighted to be unveiling this new branding today, which better reflects our individual corporate identity and speaks to our key audiences. We hope that our friendly new mascot and logo will soon become universally recognised as symbols of reliability, efficiency and safety.”
We look forward to seeing these birds (forgive the pun) in the sky.
TheDesignAir 
I would have thought Africa’s population would be too poor to sustain a viable domestic market
With double digit growth, you might need to update your views @kaiwanwordpress
I like it!