American Airlines

From 1967 American Airlines wore Massimo Vignelli’s work: Helvetica, and an eagle so reduced it was almost two strokes. Same idea as his subway and his Bloomingdale’s. It looked like it would last because it had already decided not to follow fashion. Forty-six years is a long time to be right.

In January 2013 FutureBrand put a new mark on the tail. The Flight Symbol is a diagonal split of red and blue with a white bird-head in the gap, meant to read as star, A, and eagle at once. The fuselage went pale silver. The wordmark left Helvetica for a rounder custom sans. Dezeen ran the debut. The planes still look like that.

Vignelli said there was no need

He told Businessweek he saw no reason to change. “It has no sense of permanence,” he said of the new work. American kept it. Permanence is an old modernist’s favourite word, and it is also a fair test for an airline. Liveries cost real money. You do not paint a fleet because a tail felt like 1967. Vignelli’s eagle felt like 1967 in the way a good hammer feels like a hammer. FutureBrand’s mash of patriotic parts feels like a branding exercise that found three meanings and refused to pick one.

Airline marks have to survive at two hundred miles an hour and at the size of a ticket. Vignelli’s eagle was a few lines. You could still read a bird. The 2013 symbol is clever. Clever is harder to remember than a bird. At gate distance it can look like a ribbon, a beak, or a bit of bunting. At ticket size it is a red-blue split. The old eagle was still an eagle when it was three pixels of tail.

A tail is not a mood board

UPS had hired FutureBrand a decade earlier to take a parcel off a shield. Jaguar later parked a leaping cat for spaced letters. The American job sits between them: keep the colours, complicate the animal, call the complication a symbol. FutureBrand is good at systems. Systems are not the same as a silhouette you can still see on a taxiway in rain.

The silver body was the part that photographed well. A lot of the argument at the time was about whether American still looked American. The better argument is smaller. Did the new bird still read as a bird? Sometimes. Did it read as Vignelli’s bird? No, and that was the brief.

The Flight Symbol is still on the tail. Helvetica is not on the fuselage. If you want a reason this page exists, it is that last sentence. A company can survive a worse mark. That does not make the worse mark a better eagle.

• American Airlines debuts new logo and livery, Dezeen, 21 January 2013