Ryanair Logo Font
Niki Wienberg
What is Ryanair?
Ryanair is a European low-cost air carrier, which was established in Ireland in 1984. Today the airline has one of the largest fleets in Europe (over 500 planes) and operates its flights to more than 200 destinations across the continents. It is the biggest air carrier in its country.
The uppercase Ryanair lettering from the official logo of the company is set in a stable geometric sans-serif typeface with a thick bar and straight cuts of the letters. The font, closest to the one used for the insignia, is, probably Nemorosa Extrabold, or Quarion Bold DEMO, but with the contours slightly extended.
As for the color palette of the Ryanair visual identity, it is set in yellow and dark blue, a combination, which usually stands for the sun and the sky in the logos of different airlines. Although here the shade of blue is more of a symbol of stability and professionalism.
In 2013, they decided to reuse the 1987 logo, but change the font this time. All the weird appendages were removed, and it was now just a mundane sans-serif colored in blue, although the general look stayed.
In the very early sketches, the huge cardboard letters were very visible in the background. They turn up in later sketches too, but they haven't been seen since FAH moved to their new office in January 2018.
These letters may remind you of the logo they used as their Soundcloud profile pic! The font used is probably IMPACT MT, a font from the Adobe family. You might recognise this font from the sketch titles in many of the YouTube thumbnails (FAH use Adobe Creative Cloud apps for their editing).
The distinction between font and typeface is that a font designates a specific member of a type family, while typeface designates a consistent visual appearance or style which can be a "family" or a related set of fonts.
This logo was first used as the end card in It's Good to Talk (26/09/2012) and for the last time in How Not to Tell a Story (24/08/2017). This last sketch was shot and edited during the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, so Arms possibly didn't have the new end card logo - which they had already used three times - on file.
The new logo was first used in The Old Ways are the Best Ways in July 2017, so just before FAH left for their Edinburgh Fringe run of Oink, in a very basic version without 'shadows'. It's not yet another version from the designer, you can tell by the shape of the letters that the shadows ought to be there, and the logo does look a bit 'thin' without them.
Once in a while, the card changes colours. Even the first three instalments of the new logo had a different tone each time, perhaps as a sort of trial run. They settled on the dark blue one (the 3rd try).
During the (first) Swines Tour, between Dec 2019 and March 2020, they created a striking purple end card featuring a bigger pig with a floral, lace-like motif instead of the usual 'filled' one. The floral pig design was created for the first hoodie in their merch collection by LA based artist @risaroo77 on Instagram. The letters in the logo have lost their usual 'line shadow', but if you look closely you can see a feathered dark shadow instead. The text 'ON TOUR NOW!' is set in the free open-sourced font Bebas Neue by Dharma Type (also an open source font family) and the letters have the same shadow.
The end card shown below was created especially for their 'FAHrchive' uploads on Mondays to social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but not YouTube) since April 2020, at the start of lockdown. The chosen hues fit the purpose of these sketches: dusting off the old stuff to provide some much-needed entertainment during the lockdown and some sort of consolation for people who had tickets booked for cancelled (or postponed) gigs.
In October 2020, Arms decided he would like to have the FAH YouTube end cards reimagined as motion graphics. He hired me based on a motion graphics animation of the pig I did for the FAHnARTchallenge, and of course I immediately said ABSOLUTELY! It took a few weeks to find my footing, giving them different designs closely based on the existing end cards, only more textured and of course animated. Arms didn't want to dictate a specific look and gave me carte blanche, so as to not stifle my creativity, which I appreciated a lot. It gave me lots of freedom to experiment with textures.
My first pitch were two cards that each honoured the most recently used 'static' end cards. One is from Clickbait, which I thought had the nicest looking blue background, and the other was from their Swines tour where they used the floral pig logo. Here are the originals and my designs side-by-side:
The first animated end card he used, a very pleasant surprise, was for a Monday FAHrchive sketch on Facebook (16 November 2020). This was the first FAH sketch I ever saw, back when it had just premiered... coincidence? Yes, probably, but I mentioned it to Arms anyway. The old film effect was achieved using fractal noise, a vignette and various other tricks to create that dirty, distorted lens look from old TV sets. Another way would have been to use overlays (which you can download from template sites), but I wanted to try create the look from scratch.
A good place to start with building brand consistency on social media is with your visual brand identity. This can include making use of consistent visual cues such as colors, fonts, logos, characters, design styles, subject-matters, and more. Ideally, your visual image on social media should be consistent with your brand style on your other communication channels, for a combined effect.
On LinkedIn, Lidl International focuses its efforts on recruiting and building a strong employer brand. And one of the messages at the core of its value proposition is the work-life balance on offer. To illustrate this, the supermarket chain posts regular stories about what work-life balance means to current employees and how Lidl is supporting them, alongside its #lidllifebalance hashtag. See more employer branding social media examples.
FlixBus and Innocent are both good examples of brands that consistently communicate their brand values on social media. Drinks company Innocent frequently refers back to its B-Corp status, through playful and interactive posts. While bus company FlixBus regularly mentions its focus on green energy and sustainable travel.
Unlike Innocent, The Washington Post switches its tone of voice on TikTok. Its typical serious, matter-of-fact tone turns witty and jokey on the short-form video platform, with short sketches and silly video effects. Nevertheless, there is one thing that stays consistent across all its social media channels, even if the delivery is different: each post provides insights into a single news story.
British newspaper The Economist uses its brand tone of voice consistently across its social media channels. Its posts are informative and factual, and its language is brief, clear and using everyday speech. Its Instagram posts are mini-articles in themselves, summarizing the key aspect of every story featured.
Another way to grow brand consistency on social media is through a regular posting schedule. You can do this by publishing your content on the same day(s) of the week or at the same time of day, or by creating a social media post series. Check out the brand consistency examples below for some inspiration.
The University of Amsterdam is counting down to the start of September classes with a daily tip or piece of information for new students. Each social post in the series is overlayed with the number of days left before the start of the new term to visually group them together.
Adobe Creative Cloud is also a good example of brand consistency on social media. Over on YouTube, the creative software company is regularly posting live Friday masterclasses, in which it shares tips and tricks with followers. The videos last around 1 hour and open with their branded intro sequence.
During this period, the image of a winged person bent in the form of an arch first appeared. He stands sideways, and behind him are large wings. They are so long that they form a space with four lines of different lengths. The stripes symbolize the strings of the harp and the movement of flapping wings. The company name Ryanair is in a subdued blue color.
For the Ryanair logo, designers proposed several types of custom-developed fonts. Of course, they differed from each other over time, but they always remained grotesque and cursively written. Changes in modernity have led the inscription to a completely different style. Letters became flat, vertical, and smooth, resembling the symbols of Core Sans N 83 Ex Heavy and Core Sans N SC 83 Ex Heavy fonts from S-Core.
Headquartered in Orlando, Florida, AirTran Airways was established in 1993 as Conquest Sun Airlines by the management of two small airlines, Destination Sun Airways and Conquest Airlines, with Conquest Airlines co-founder Victor Rivas being heavily involved in the establishment of Conquest Sun. The airline was purchased by the AirTran Corporation in 1994 and was renamed to AirTran Airways. The airline was later spun off under the new Airways Corporation holding company by the AirTran Corporation.
The airline and the Airways Corporation holding company was purchased in 1997 by the ValuJet holding company, which owned the struggling ValuJet Airlines. The ValuJet holding company became known as AirTran Holdings and merged ValuJet Airlines into AirTran Airways. ValuJet Airlines was renamed "AirTran Airlines" before it was merged into AirTran Airways.
AirTran operated nearly 700 daily flights, primarily in the eastern and midwestern United States, with its principal hub at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where it operated nearly 200 daily departures. AirTran's fleet consisted of Boeing 717-200 aircraft, of which it was the world's largest operator, and Boeing 737-700 aircraft.
AirTran Airways was established by both the management of Destination Sun Airways and the management of regional airline Conquest Airlines. The establishment of Destination Sun Airways is unclear. It is claimed [by whom?] that Destination Sun was established in 1991 by former Northeastern International Airways CEO Guy Lindley and that the airline was formerly known as SunExpress and based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Another source claimed that Destination Sun was established in 1990 by a bunch of pilots that are presumably ex-Eastern Air Lines pilots since it was claimed later on by the AirTran management that the establishment of AirTran involved former Eastern Air Lines employees. Meanwhile, Conquest Airlines was founded by Rafael Rivas and Victor Rivas in April 1988 in Texas. Victor Rivas, co-founder of Conquest Airlines, was also heavily involved in the establishment of Conquest Sun Airlines.[3][4]
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