One Stroke, Forty Years
How a single calligraphic gesture taught a generation of designers that restraint is not absence — it is the most exacting form of presence.
I first saw the brushwing in a corridor at Kai Tak, three months before the airport closed for good. It was printed on a boarding pass — that single white stroke against the jade tailfin — and I remember thinking it looked less like a logo and more like a decision made at the last possible moment.
The Weight of Empty Space
When the studio began the 1994 identity programme, the brief was deceptively simple: make the carrier feel rooted in its city without resorting to cliché. Forty years of visual history had already accumulated — the original brushwing from 1970, the intermediate versions, the weight of a national symbol carried on the tail of every aircraft in the fleet. The question facing the designers was not what to add but what to remove.