National pride, global capital: a social semiotic analysis of transnational visual branding in the airline industry

In this article we examine 561 different airline tailfin designs as a visual genre, revealing how the global-local binary may be managed and realized semiotically. Our analysis is organized into three strands: (a) a descriptive analysis identifies the strikingly restricted visual lexicon and dominant corporate aesthetic established by tailfin design; (b) an interpretive analysis considers the communicative strategies at play and the meaning potentials which underpin different visual resources; (c) a critical analysis links these decisions of design and branding to the political and cultural economies of globalism and the airline industry. Specifically, we show how airlines are able to service national identity concerns through the use of highly localized visual meanings while also appealing to the meaning systems of the international market in their pursuit of symbolic and economic capital. One key semiotic resource is the balancing of cultural symbolism and perceptual iconicity in the form of abstracted stylizations of kinetic effects. Although positioned unfairly in the global semioscape, airlines may resist straightforward cultural homogenization by strategically reworking existing design structures and exploiting possibly universal semiotic meaning potentials.