Rebranding Kenya Airways:What Our airline should look like

 Readers of my blog should now be familiar with Kyle Hwang,the young airline nerd from Pretoria ,South Africa and an aspiring airline livery designer with very interesting ideas.Last month,we blogged about Kyle's redesign of South African Airways livery in which he dared to reintroduce the controversial apartheid era Springbok logo.

When I saw the awesome Redesign ,I was convinced our national carrier,KQ could do with a little help from Kyle.KQ's livery isn't that bad,at least compared to the old KA livery,for once ,our flag colours are boldly displayed but the livery doesn't incorporate any cultural symbol from Kenya!An airline livery(especially for a national carrier) should accentuate the culture and history of the country.What comes to mind when you think of Kenya?Of course the Maasai and the prominent shield on our flag.At the risk of sounding politically incorrect,let me say that that shield,an idea from a brilliant founding father of the country,is "our Springbok" and it should be on our national carrier's livery.

The Kenyan Shield:A symbol of national struggle for freedom

Now Kyle has done a Kenya Airways Redesign incorporating the shield.Here is his take on the livery:


Requested by Sam from Flight Africa. When he asked me to do a KQ livery I was a bit confused. I couldn’t find anything wrong with it. But then after I did some research, I couldn’t find anything right with it either. Complaints that came up were that the brand looks cheap. It was designed by Boeing (who goes to Boeing these days for livery designs I mean c’mon!) and has a typical American cartoonized image of Africa. My attempt strongly uses the colours of the Kenyan flag with the black replaced by a more charcoal colours to give it a more upper class feeling. Gone are those ugly paint splotches at the back as they are replaced with more elegant Kenyan colours. The logo depicts the Samburu shield found on the Kenyan flag with the letter K in the middle. “The Pride of Africa” titles stay. That was at least right  Read Kyle's Blog

 East African Airways:The Airline for Kenya,Uganda and Tanzania

 The "Old" Kenya Airways

 Kenya Airways after the 2005 rebranding

 The future:Time to introduce our national symbol:The shield





What's your take on KQ's livery and the above redesign?
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