From Bristol Bay bush flights to SeaTac.

Alaska Airlines traces itself to McGee Airways, which Linious “Mac” McGee set up in Anchorage in 1932 — English Wikipedia gives 14 April 1932 — with a service between Anchorage and Bristol Bay. Flights were unscheduled: aircraft left when passengers, cargo or mail needed carrying. In 1934 McGee sold the business to Star Air Service, another Anchorage operator, and over the following decade it changed owners and names several times. Wikipedia records the name Alaska Star Airlines from 1942 and gives 2 May 1944 as the date the name Alaska Airlines was adopted, with headquarters in Anchorage during the 1940s.

After the war the airline moved its base of operations south to Paine Field in Everett, Washington, keeping an office in Anchorage, Wikipedia says. In 1985 Alaska Air Group was formed as a holding company for the airline, and in 1986 the group acquired the regional carrier Horizon Air, which kept a brand of its own. Today the airline is headquartered in SeaTac, Washington, beside Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, belongs to the Oneworld alliance, and is owned by Alaska Air Group.

Two acquisitions have reshaped the brand since 2016. Alaska Air Group completed its purchase of Virgin America, the San Francisco Bay Area airline launched in 2005, on 14 December 2016, Wikipedia says; the two moved onto one passenger service system in April 2018, after which flight numbers, website, apps and airport kiosks carried a single brand, Alaska Airlines, and Virgin America flew its last flight that month. On 17 September 2024 The New York Times reported that the US Transportation Department had cleared Alaska’s acquisition of Hawaiian Airlines, subject to conditions, and quoted Alaska’s chief executive, Ben Minicucci, saying the airline looked forward to “formally welcoming Hawaiian Airlines’ guests and employees.” Wikipedia says the acquisition was completed in 2024 and that both the Alaska and Hawaiian names were to be kept as separate brands.

A face on the tail since 1972.

The airline’s signature mark is the portrait painted on its tailfin, which the company calls its Eskimo. The Anchorage Daily News reported in January 2016 that the face had appeared on Alaska Airlines jets since 1972. English Wikipedia places the change under Ronald Cosgrave, who took charge in the early 1970s and set out to improve the airline’s public image; it describes the image as a smiling Inuk man.

Who the face shows has long been discussed. Some believe it was inspired by Chester Seveck, a reindeer herder in Kotzebue, or by Oliver Amouak, an Inupiat man, the Daily News reported. The company’s position, given by its spokeswoman Halley Knigge, was that it had found no official record linking the image to any one person, and that the face was “never intended to depict a specific person” but “chosen to represent the Arctic region and its people.” Helvi Sandvik, president of NANA Development Corp. and an Alaska Air Group board member who grew up in Kiana, near Kotzebue, told the paper that in Kotzebue “we all think he’s Chester Seveck.”

The mark has also had political backing. In 1987 the company reviewed whether to replace it with something else, such as a mountain, and in 1988 the Alaska Legislature passed a joint resolution supporting “the continued use of the ‘Happy Face’ logo,” the Daily News reported. The same article described a separate conversation about the word “Eskimo” itself and whether it is considered offensive; the Alutiiq artist Perry Eaton told the paper he was “honored that the ethnicity is honored in this way,” adding that there was “pushback on that these days.” As part of its 2016 update, the company talked with leaders and artists in Alaska Native communities about what the face means to them.

Airline identity.

An airline’s identity is carried by a wide range of surfaces. The livery is one of them: the paint scheme that runs along the fuselage, the colour of the belly and engines, and the way the name is set along the side. The tail fin is a prominent single mark, seen from the terminal window, on the apron and in the sky, and many carriers use it for a symbol, a portrait or a pattern rather than the name itself.

Inside, the identity continues in the cabin: seat fabrics and headrest covers, bulkhead panels, lighting colours, cups, napkins and the cards in the seat pocket. On the ground it appears in airport signage — check-in desks, gate screens, boarding passes, baggage tags and the uniforms of staff.

Each guide sets out what can be checked about the brand behind those surfaces — who founded the airline, who owns it now, how its name and marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From icicle script to an italic wordmark.

On 25 January 2016 the Alaska Air Group chief executive, Brad Tilden, unveiled a rebranding to employees at the airline’s hangar at Sea-Tac, The Seattle Times reported. Until then the planes wore a purely black-and-white livery, with “Alaska” written in a typeface designed to resemble icicles. In the new design the tail was swathed in a dark blue edged with lighter blues and green, and the lighter colours also traced the fur lining of the parka; a clean-lined italic replaced the icicle script. The face itself stayed, smoothed and simplified but largely the same, the Anchorage Daily News reported. The new look was to be applied to the website, airport gates, mobile app and credit cards as well as the aircraft.

The project was led by Sangita Woerner, the airline’s vice president of marketing, who had joined from Starbucks, where she headed coffee-brand management; she said the airline was updating its brand “so it shows up bolder wherever we go,” the Seattle Times reported. Tilden, in a company video quoted by the Daily News, called the face “the personification of who we are.” English Wikipedia adds that in January 2026 Alaska introduced a modified “global” livery based on the aurora borealis, for the widebody aircraft that came with the Hawaiian Airlines merger.

For a design guide, Alaska Airlines shows how a single symbol can be carried through mergers and refreshes while the script, colours and typography around it change. Compare Hawaiian Airlines, now part of the same group, and United Airlines. For this guide we use a deep navy, a glacier blue and an aurora green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Alaska Airlines’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.