Vulfpeck

Hughes Airwest Identity

One of the favorite identities from my childhood memories, created by Mario Armond Zamparelli Design (L.A.) circa 1970. According to the Wikipedia entry, the airline lasted a mere decade, until it was acquired by Republic Airlines in October 1980.

To me, this logo serves as an intriguing study of the compelling power created by the push and pull between abstraction and legibility. The logotype is sufficiently bold and unique to stand on its own, without its accompanying graphic symbol which, while fitting harmoniously with the letterforms, really doesn't bring much new to the table that isn't already being brought about by the letterforms. I can't imagine a firm getting away with (or a corporate client approving) this level of abstraction in today's design world.

It's a foregone conclusion that such an abstraction of form might give rise to the casual viewer "seeing" all kinds of visual references. Escalator, printed circuit board, radio antennae, directional arrows, aircraft flight trajectory, highway, arcane long-lost tribal scrawlings, etc.; it's all there, and it's fascinating.

In addition to the extreme degree of formal abstraction, what is equally fascinating to me is the complete absence of curvilinear forms within the composition. While it would result in additional complexity in execution and draughtsmanship, it's interesting to ponder (and, possibly, visually investigate first-hand) the effect that the inclusion of curves might have on what is, in totality, such a brittle and precise formal language.

All in all, it stands as a wonderfully compelling mark crafted during the waning years of the modernist identity movement.

Today's Random Eight

Modernist Trademarks, Some Personal Favorites

Being born in the late '60s, I came of age at the tail end of the great modernist movement in corporate identity design. Beginning earnestly in the early 1900s, the movement achieved its greatest momentum in the mid to late '50s, and ran a strong course through about 1970 or so, after which point one begins to see the modernist movement (at least in identity) shift from a genuine means of expression to more of a stylistic "treatment"; a cliché, if you will.

Some of my favorites—
(this is an ongoing list, to be updated regularly)

Crown-Zellerbach — 1969

Weyerhaeuser — 1960

And now, for some sneaker business.

Ladies and gentlemen, I collect shoes. Specifically, vintage Nike basketball shoes from the early '80s. And what you see below is my all time favorite Nike basketball shoe, the Nike Airship Hi. Released in 1984, it was only the second Nike basketball shoe ever to utilize their new Air cushion insole. Known to many as the "Air Force 2", the overall design, while sharing some of the Air Force I's basic construction, was really an all-new design sporting some brilliant features.

 

Back in '85, sneakerheads in the Pacific Northwest could walk into their local GI Joe's and pick up a pair of White / Natural Airships for $74.95. Big bucks for sneakers back then! If you wanted your Airships in a team colorway, you might luck out and find a store that carried the White / Blue colorway, or you had to find the regional source that supplied the area's basketball teams. In Eugene, Oregon, that was Luby's, downtown on 6th Avenue. Walk through their front doors and you had full-on displays of Airships and AJ1s in all the colors. It felt like Christmas to me.

Gone was the AF1's cumbersome ankle strap. Instead, Nike significantly increased the height of the ankle wrap area, adding more interior padding and capping the top of the wrap with a striking leather colorway option.

Down front, the lace region just above the toe box received what I would call a forefoot hinge point. Essentially, engineers sliced down each side of the shoe, just above the toe box, to allow for greater forefoot flexibility. To keep the foot and shoe in correct relationship, and to keep everything held together as a tight unit, the slice/gap is kept pulled together by a membrane of strong yet flexible woven elastic sheathing. Whether it was deemed an engineering/design victory is unclear, but Nike would never again utilize this unique construction on any shoe.

Further down, the outsoles are fairly straightforward, borrowing much of the AF1's design, with one exception. From mid-foot back to the heel region, Nike designed what is essentially a hollowed out chamber — sort of a cylindrical shape, hemispherical in cross section — which was, like the aforementioned forefoot hinge point, a design feature never to be used again on any Nike shoe. This feature of the outsole is a curious looking form; my feeling is the absence of rubber sole support along the centerline of the midfoot to heel region allowed the player's full weight to bear on the extreme outer edges of the sole. How this might have translated into a performance improvement, I'm not sure.

Currently, I own three pair of these rare birds — two pair in White / Natural (the most common), and one rattier pair in White / Blue. For me, the combination of striking aesthetics and strange, one-season-only performance features makes the Airship Hi one seriously collectible sneaker.

Tune in next time when I break out a box stock mint example of a shoe that's arguably even rarer (though not as successful) as the Airship: The Nike Air Train.