I’ve always considered Allegiant Air to be one of those airlines that I’d only fly if was really desperate and there were no other options available. After all, they have never been known to be anything but a budget air carrier here in the US and quite frankly, I’m at the point in my life where I don’t mind spending a few extra dollars for a better experience on another airline. But how bad can Allegiant really be? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself a lot over the past few years, so about a month ago I made a conscious decision to choose Allegiant over a plethora of other choices for a quick trip I needed to make to the Pacific Northwest. And you know what? It wasn’t an entirely bad experience! For the price I paid, I was pleasantly satisfied and I wouldn’t hesitate to fly with them again.

Despite being notorious for penny-pinching and cutting corners, Allegiant is making great strides to improve it’s in-flight experience with the addition of A319 and A320 aircraft to replace it’s aging fleet of MD-80’s. The MD-80’s were the backbone of the G4 fleet since the beginning, so it is a bit weird to see this livery on any other type of aircraft – even though the transition has been going on for several years now.

Speaking of the livery, it’s not that bad IMHO. I wouldn’t go as far as to call it as classy as something like what LAN or Hawaiian is doing these days, but I think it fits their brand ideology perfectly. Remember – this is a Ultra Low Cost Carrier (ULCC), so it’s understandable that the livery leans more towards the flashy side of the spectrum as opposed to being more reserved and sophisticated. The purpose of this livery is to grab attention! Bright colors, high contrast, and a splash of marketing messaging help to convey the “budget” message loud and proud.

I need to point out, however, that blue and orange is my absolute favorite color combination. I’m of the opinion that it’s hard to make anything look bad in blue and orange, so it makes me wonder if I’d have a different opinion of this livery if it were anything else. I don’t particularly care for the generic typeface they used in the logo, and the sun illustration looks a bit like clipart, but the colors make up for those shortcomings in a big way.

Spirit Airlines is one of those obscure air carriers that I’ve never really given much thought to in the past. They’ve always just sort of been there, distant and uninteresting, mostly flying to places I never travel to. But all of that has been changing over the past few years – they are quickly turing into a major low-fare airline, and I’m starting to hear more and more people talk about them wherever I go. Usually that talk isn’t so good (they are probably the stingiest airline in the US right now), but it’s been interesting to watch them grow from nothing into the near-beheamoth they are today.

All that growth has meant that they’ve had to experiment with a lot of different things over the years, playing with different business models and fine-tuning their product. That continuous fine-tuning has resulted in three different liveries over the past decade – all of them quite different from one another, reflecting a “low fare” look with a twinge of serious professionalism. Sort of. Let me explain…

The silver and black “pixel” livery at the top of this post is my favorite of their last three liveries. It’s cool, high-tech, and very unique. It doesn’t really convey the “low fare” message very well, and I’d go as far as to say it does the exact opposite. It looks very high end! That’s probably why it didn’t last so long.

The next livery (below) was unveiled just a few short years later, and to me, it was a huge step down in terms of style and design. I’m not really sure, but the bright blue and and neon accent colors just scream “cheap vacation packages to Cancun”. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I really cringed when I first saw it. I couldn’t believe they killed the pixel livery!

Spirit Airlines blue and white livery

And finally, Spirit just went through another major rebranding effort last fall. The livery they came up with was…well…um…bold. Have a look for yourself:

Spirit Airlines yellow livery

I have to give them credit though. If they are looking for attention, they are certainly going to get it with these bright yellow banana planes flying around. How could you not notice something this flashy over all the other airlines that are mostly white with a few splashes of color here and there? Knowing how risky they’ve been with their marketing campaigns in the past, I’m pretty confident in saying that I’m sure that’s their goal. They’ve succeeded admirably in gaining my attention.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to illustrate these three Spirit Airlines liveries on the A319. I was dreading the silver and black pixel livery the most, as I wasn’t sure I would be able to replicate it with any sort of realism. But it wasn’t that bad – and as a matter of fact it just reaffirmed itself as my favorite Spirit Airlines color scheme of the past 10 years. The yellow version was the most difficult of the three – yellow is always a difficult color to render because it’s way too easy to make the shadows look muddy (“poopy” is another way to describe it). On top of that, there isn’t always enough contrast to be able to show gloss and reflections accurately. I gave it my best shot though, and I hope you enjoy.