SAS is the leading airline in Scandinavia and one of its strongest and most recognized brands. As their global brand agency for more than a decade, Bold Scandinavia has covered everything from strategy and positioning to brand design, fleet livery, uniforms, packaging design, digital experiences, and much more. I joined the team to lead the 2022 design refresh, where SAS needed to shift into a more attractive choice for leisure travellers since their main target group business travellers was decreasing due to new ways of working.

With the goal to create a stronger emotional connection between SAS and their travelers, in 2022 I worked with Bold Scandinavia to develope an updated brand strategy, story and brand identity that signals quality, care and warmth, while preserving a strong recognition to the brand’s iconic design heritage. In addition to visual elements such as a new bespoke serif font, colors and layout system, we have also developed new concepts for motion and tone of voice in close collaboration with Åkestam Holst.

The strategy was to bring in more emotionally relevant element and create an emotinall narrative around travelling to attract not only business- but leisure travellers.

In collaboration with Letters of Sweden we developed Scandinavian Serif, a soft serif inspired by the aestetics of the logotype and aligned in X-height with the core font Scandinavian New. The font was used to highlight and inform, adding a more emotional and soft side to the brand.

The need for high recognition is always key in paid media and SAS is known for it's blue color in combination with other elements. In order to be able to use the blue together with images and film we developed a simple yet powerful layout system where the blue gradients creates a soft and emotional framing and allows us to move between content as well as use it as a background for graphic elements.

In order to really get the emotional narrative come to life we developed an image style with the idea of "The travellers point of view", meaning we're down on the street looking up, we're in the middle of conversation and we're experiencing everything as the curious travellers we are. An analogue grade and imperfect compositions creates an active and inspiring set of images.  

The gradient was developed both as static components in layouts and transitions, but also as a flowing cloud landscape as seen above on the in-flight-screens.