Case Study 02 · Ticket Attendant
A brand system, built to scale down.
The first thing I was handed when I joined Ticket Attendant. Ten colours, an illegible favicon, and three illustration styles that didn't agree with each other — and then a website, a brand book and a trade show built on top of the fix.
Role
Designer, with the senior designer
Scope
Logo, brand book, style guide, website
Tools
Adobe Illustrator, WordPress
Year
2024
The Mark
Streamlined, and finally legible at 16 pixels.
We kept the purple — it was the one piece of equity worth protecting — and kept the airline-inspired naming that gives the company its character. Everything else was rebuilt.
Drag the handle — or focus it and use the ← → keys
Before. A flight attendant inside a circular frame beside two tickets, in nearly ten colours. It could not scale — the detail turned to mush at small sizes — and the illustration styles inside it never agreed with one another. It is soft here because 100 pixels was all that ever existed of it.
After. A ticket shape to the left of the ta initials. Two colours, drawn as vector. It scales cleanly to any size, the ticket alone works as a favicon and an app icon, and the imagery and letterforms finally share one geometric language.
A cohesive brand is more than just a logo or a colour palette — it is a reflection of company values, mission, and unique identity.
Beyond the Logo
A texture for everything else.
A mark on its own doesn't make a company look like a company. I built a repeating background pattern from the TA letterforms and ran it through every touchpoint — business cards, newsletters, brochures, the website — so the brand had a texture people would recognise before they read a word of it.
The brand book and style guide made that repeatable by someone who wasn't me. That is the part that mattered: once the rules were written down, the marketing team stopped asking permission and started shipping.
The Website
With the brand updated, the site was next.
The voice, the content and the overall feel all needed to match. The old site was inefficient and outdated; the new one is simpler, more direct, and clear about what a visitor should do.
Outcome
Updated and uniform.
The organisation took to the unified approach quickly. The clearest proof came at the annual trade show: promotional materials, signage and merchandise all got dramatically easier to produce, because nobody had to re-decide what the company looked like every time they opened a file.
Reflection
What I learned
I came in expecting a logo project and left with a much better understanding of what a brand system is for. It isn't decoration. It's a decision made once that makes the next hundred decisions cheap.
The scaling constraint taught me the most. A mark that only works large is a mark that doesn't work — the favicon, the app icon and the embroidered polo shirt are not edge cases, they're the real test. Designing from the smallest use upward produced a better result than designing beautifully and shrinking it afterwards. That is the same lesson mobile-first taught me on Concourse, arriving from a completely different direction.
It also gave me the foundation for everything that followed. By the time we started designing the product, there was no argument left about what Ticket Attendant looked or sounded like.
Next case study