This was one of my most beloved jobs! Working as a designer and photographer at an airline company was challenging but has brought me great satisfaction.
I cared for the entire brand family: Carpatair, Moldavian, and the Flight School.
I will start with a special project that I have done for the Flight School and then i will get to general projects 🙂
The company bought two new airplanes and we had to get qualification for our pilots to fly them. We had to send them over to another country for a part of the course, so the idea came to make our own simulated interface.
I worked with a pilot to design an exact life size simulation of an ATR 72 – 500 air plane cabin that contained the entire airplane interface. We needed to be extra carefull and check every control since the interface was not standard, it was a custom ATR.
In the end this saved the company a lot of money, and we extended this program to other airplane types too.
The new airplanes were being operated by us in partnership with Alitalia and I was asked to create a livery for them. It was much more technical than a normal project.
We were a traditional airline, competing with low cost airlines which offered flights much cheaper than us. So our initial target were people travelling for business purpose looking for the comfort and professionalism that we offer.
At that time, online presence was not that heavy overall so we were still using lots of prints, I created advertising, presentation and promotional materials: large outdoor prints, catalogues, flyers, all the materials needed for the fairs, exhibitions.
I was part of the marketing team, we were always trying new stuff and started looking into increasing our online presence too, I designed materials needed for online promotion trough Facebook and social media (landing pages, ads) or Google AdWords – animated or static banners.
One of my roles was to design the layout for the company web sites and support the developers to put them online.
In time, competition became so fierce that we had to adapt, lose some of the premium service, lower the prices and we experimented with connecting flights to stories. For example, we made discount offers that connected to a season (fresh offer for spring) or creating a package that was promoting a cultural event and it was including the flight too.
Another step was the contest campaigns, doing our best to engage the users to fly with us, by that time websites were not necessarily responsive and that allowed me to play more freely with vectors and images, making up stories.
One of the reasons I loved this job – I could manifest myself as a photographer too, they needed me for airline photography – photo sessions with airplanes and crew, product photography for the sales on-board magazine, and then I was doing the photo editing – scaling, optimising, adding / removing elements as needed.