The Heritage Dilemma
Air France has one of the most storied visual identities in aviation. The 1968 Andre Laval logo. The blue chevron. The Calder mobiles. When you have that much equity in archival work, a rebrand is an exercise in archaeology as much as design.
What the New Work Got Right
The refresh - by the in-house team with external collaboration - brought back the chevron as a structural element rather than a logo. It is embedded in typography, in spatial design, in the way motion graphics move. The chevron stopped being a badge and became a grammar. That is a sophisticated move.
The Risk of Over-Referencing
Heritage brands face a specific failure mode: becoming museums of themselves. When every design decision reaches backward, the brand signals that its best days are behind it. Air France's refresh avoided this by treating heritage as a vocabulary rather than a reference. You feel the history without being shown it.
Why This Matters Beyond Airlines
Every brand with significant heritage faces this brief eventually. The question is never 'how do we protect our heritage?' The question is: 'how do we use our heritage to build forward?' Air France's answer is worth studying by any brand that has earned its visual equity over decades.
