A320 – Norebbo

Virgin America A320-214 illustration

0 January 24, 2014 Standard

A few nights ago I thought it would be fun to create some side view illustrations of a Virgin America A320. It seemed like an innocent enough thought – after all, this livery is basically all white with just a few splashes of red here and there. Right? Not quite. The biggest issue, by far, was the Virgin America titles on the forward fuselage. That typeface was custom designed by Matthew Aaron Desmond, so therefore, it’s not something that is available as a download anywhere on the web. “No problem – I’ll recreate it myself”, is the only thing that an adventurous designer like me thinks when facing a hurdle like that, so I busted out my Wacom tablet and fired up Adobe Illustrator. 10 minutes later, I gave up.

No, it’s not a particularly difficult font to recreate. The problem is that my time is scarce these days, and I thought it was a pretty poor use of what precious little down time I have. But then I had a thought…

During a recent trip that involved air travel, I took a few pictures at the airport to pass time between flights. One of those photos just happened to be a perfectly side-on view of a Virgin America A320. I could extract the title from that! And that’s exactly what I did. What you see on these illustrations are not graphic representations of the main titles, but actually parts of the photo I took and blended in with the rest of the drawing to look natural. I should point out that the slight white “halo” you see around that text in these small 1024-wide samples are not part of the larger source illustration. That’s just an unfortunate artifact from compressing these images for web viewing.

Anyway, here is the same illustration as above without the dark / watermarked background. Feel free take these and use them however you wish:

Two side view illustrations of a Virgin America A320 over a white background

Pan Am Airbus A320 illustration

0 August 16, 2013 Standard

Every now and then, the 80’s airline nerd in me grabs hold and I start reminiscing about the “good ‘ol days” in the airline industry. I was just a teenager in the mid 80’s, but my interest in commercial aviation was strong (despite the fact that I never got to travel much) and I really enjoyed watching the contrails in the sky above. Northwest Orient, Pan Am, Eastern – man…those were the days.

The other night I was putting the final touches on an Airbus A320 template illustration, and I couldn’t resist the temptation of painting the old Pan Am livery on it. Yeah, I know that this version of the livery had been unveiled long before the 80’s but I do remember seeing it often at my home airport of DTW whenever I was lucky enough to actually get out there.

I did have to take a few artistic liberties with it, namely painting the engines white instead of keeping them bare metal which was common back in the day. I’m not sure why, but an A320 with bare metal engines just looks…odd. I also made the conscious choice to use cfm56 engines. And of course, it just had to have sharklets!

As far as fantasy liveries go, I almost like this one better than the Saul Bass United 787 I created last week. There’s just something so cool about the Pan Am livery that can make any airplane look good.

Airbus A320 blank illustration templates

1 August 14, 2013 Standard

I’ve already created blank side view templates of all of the most interesting widebody commercial aircraft (DC-10, 777-200, 787-8, A380-800, and A350-900), so I thought it would be good to start getting practical and tackle more of the smaller and more common stuff. It’s not as much fun, but it needs to be done!

First up is this Airbus A320. Now, you’d probably think that creating a template of a smaller aircraft such as this would be much easier than some of the bigger airplanes I’ve been doing recently, and you’d be right – to a point. The difficulty comes when you factor in all the variants of the A320. There are two engines available (v2500 and cm56) and two different types of wingtips (rakelets and sharklets) – and any combination of all this stuff is available from Airbus today. So that means once I had the basic template created, there were a handful of variants I needed to create to make this a complete set.

The aircraft at the top of this post is an A320 with cm56 engines and rakelets. And here is the associated line drawing:

Airbus A320 technical line drawing with cm56 engines and rakelets

Next up is the all white rendering and wireframe line drawing for the variant with the cm56 engines and the new sharklets:

All white Airbus A320 drawing with cm56 engines and sharklets

Airbus A320 technical line drawing with cm56 engines and sharklets

Now, here are the templates for the v2500 version with rakelets:

All white Airbus A320 drawing with v2500 engines and rakelets

Airbus A320 technical line drawing with v2500 engines and rakelets

And finally, here is the v2500 version with sharklets:

All white Airbus A320 drawing with v2500 engines and sharklets

Airbus A320 technical line drawing with v2500 engines and sharklets

While a bit confusing, all these different variants help to make the Airbus A320 one of the best selling commercial aircraft of all time. And they’re not even done tinkering! There are rumors floating around of a new engine option (NEO) coming soon, which will help to keep the A320 competitive for years to come. And you can be sure I’ll create a template of that one as soon as I can get my paws on some decent (and accurate) reference material.