Pass through Tampa International Airport and you may notice its colorful logo. Swoops of red, orange and blue with a stylized airplane in the center.
What you may not know is that it was designed by pioneering graphic designer and wayfinder Jane Doggett who passed away last year.
Her work at Baltimore-Washington, Houston Bush, Tampa, and other airports during the first few decades of the jet age set the standard for airport wayfinding to come, and is one of the highlights of mid-20th century airport design.
Wayfinding is the “thread that you’re following from airport entrance to gate, that you have that continuity of flow,” as Doggett put it in a 2019 PBS documentary. It’s an integral part of any airport design and includes both signage and architectural cues.
For example, the roof line of the concourses in HOK-designed Terminal B at New York’s LaGuardia Airport slopes up from the furthest gates to a peak at the terminal bridge. That sloping roof is a subtle cue guiding arriving travelers to the bridge and the city beyond.
I first became aware of Doggett’s work when I interviewed Charles Brickbauer for Curbed in 2018. He, along with Warren Peterson, designed Baltimore-Washington International Airport’s (BWI) 1979 terminal. He described her graphical wayfinding system for the airport that used logos and nautical flags as “brilliant” in our interview.
Doggett explained the wayfinding system at BWI in an interview with Architectural Record in 1980:
“The bicentennial spirit was trying to take off, and I thought we would take flag waving to the zenith. For this purpose, it seemed natural to exploit the International Nautical Signal Flags — Alpha, Bravo, Charlie etc. — to signify the piers. To me, these are some of the most beautiful graphics in the purest form, with proven read-out abilities. And since many terminals have stripped away much of the airlines' colors and symbols in a quest for near-military conformity, I thought we could reverse the process, and erect a colossal supermarket display of logos."
A “colossal supermarket display of logos” is a good way to put it. Photos of BWI at the time show large, colorful airline logos prominently lining the wall above the ticket counters. Looking for TWA? Just spot the iconic red and white logo.
Compare the check-in counter area at BWI today.
The project that Doggett reportedly was most fond of was the Tampa airport terminal that opened in 1971. There, as mentioned at the start, her multi-colored logo remains in use today.
In a 2019 PBS documentary, she explained how the airport’s engineers planned to designate the terminal’s two frontages as north and south. She instead proposed using blue and red — a color system that remains in use today — as a more intuitive wayfinding system to ordinary travelers. Who would know north from south as they drove through the web of roads to the terminal, she asked.
Boston Logan, Cleveland, Memphis, Houston Bush, Jacksonville, Miami, Newark, Orlando, and Shreveport were among the other airports that Doggett worked on during her career.
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Spirit Airlines commercial chief Matt Klein at Routes America shed some light on its network strategy post-JetBlue. Less Florida (I read that as less Orlando) and more connections to start. More to come in the airline’s summer schedule.
What I’m Reading
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What I’m Listening To
Shout out to my friends Jon Ostrower, Brett Snyder, and Brian Sumers of The Airline Observer for their new podcast, The Air Show. That have a few episodes up now but all are well worth a listen.