Brisbane Airport Brand Guidelines: Eagle Farm 1925, a 1997 Lease & Jet-Stream Ribbons

A caretaker’s cottage, a famous landing and a move north-east.

Brisbane Airport dates its story to April 1925, when, Campaign Brief reported in 2025, the first airport groundsman moved into the caretaker’s cottage at the Eagle Farm Aerodrome. English Wikipedia says Eagle Farm was built that year on former farmland about six kilometres north-east of central Brisbane, and that Qantas began operating there in 1926, although most of the city’s flights at first used Archerfield, which had a better landing surface.

Eagle Farm’s most famous arrival came on 9 June 1928, when Charles Kingsford Smith landed there in the Southern Cross at the end of what Wikipedia describes as the first trans-Pacific flight. The aircraft is now kept in a museum, with a memorial, inside the airport precinct, Wikipedia says.

By the 1960s Eagle Farm was too small for the city’s growth, Wikipedia says, and many long-haul services to Asia had to stop on the way. The federal government announced a new airport immediately north-east of the old one; construction began in June 1980, on the former suburb of Cribb Island, with sand pumped from Moreton Bay to lift the swampland above the tides. The new Brisbane Airport opened on 19 March 1988 with a domestic terminal and two runways, and the last flight left Eagle Farm the following day. Pieces of the old airport survive: the north-east end of its main runway is now a taxiway, and its international terminal became the cargo terminal. The present international terminal was opened in September 1995.

A 50-year lease and four main shareholders.

The airport left government hands in 1997. As part of the privatisation of a number of Australian airports, English Wikipedia says, Brisbane Airport Corporation took over the airport from the Federal Airports Corporation under a 50-year lease, with an option to renew for a further 49 years; Royal Schiphol Group, one of the shareholders, dates the grant of that lease to July 1997. The original shareholders were Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Brisbane City Council, the Commonwealth Bank and the Port of Brisbane Corporation, Wikipedia says, and since then the company has been responsible for the airport’s operations and for infrastructure investment without government funding. Brisbane is classed as a Leased Federal Airport.

The shareholder list has changed since. Wikipedia gives the main holders as of January 2024 as Queensland Investment Corporation with 29 percent, Igneo Infrastructure Partners with 27 percent, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol with 20 percent and IFM Investors with 20 percent. In January 2025 Royal Schiphol Group said it had raised its holding in Brisbane Airport Corporation Holdings, the parent company, by 0.52 points to 20.13 percent, buying from another shareholder, which it said guarantees it a second board seat in future. The Dutch group, whose own airport has a guide at Schiphol, has been a shareholder since 1997.

The biggest project of the leased era was a second main runway. The federal government approved a new parallel runway on 18 September 2007, Wikipedia says, on swampland west of the terminals that needed millions of cubic metres of sand dredged from Moreton Bay and a long settling period. The first flight on the new runway, a Virgin Australia service to Cairns, took off on 12 July 2020.

Wikipedia describes the airport as a hub for both Qantas and Virgin Australia, with separate domestic, international, cargo and general aviation terminals and an area of about 2,700 hectares. Royal Schiphol Group gave 2024 traffic as more than 17.5 million domestic and 6.2 million international passengers.

How airport operators present themselves.

An airport operator presents itself in two registers at once. Passengers meet the airport: its name, its signs, its terminals and its departure boards. Investors, governments and partner cities meet the operator: the company that holds the concession, publishes traffic figures and announces new terminals. Many operators keep these two faces apart, with a passenger-facing airport name and a separate corporate name for the group behind it.

Inside the terminal, the identity is carried mostly by wayfinding. Signs are set in a clear sans-serif, in short words with arrows and pictograms, and colour is used to separate departures, arrivals, transfers and ground transport. Some operators describe their signage as a system in its own right: VINCI Airports, for example, says its customer signage and furniture come in several ranges, so that each airport in its network can choose items to suit its size and budget.

Online, the airport becomes a guide to places. Route maps, destination pages and airline lists show where a traveller can fly, while terminal and runway photography, often taken at dawn or dusk, gives the airport a recognisable image. Retail, dining and parking pages present the terminal as a place to spend time, and some operators extend this into an “airport city” of hotels, offices and transport links around the runways.

The corporate layer is plainer. Owners and concession holders publish newsrooms, traffic reports, logo downloads and press photography, and they describe their airports by passenger numbers, routes and terminal projects, with dates. For designers, the category shows how one identity can work at walking pace for a hurried traveller and, at the same time, as a sober record for shareholders and the public authorities that grant the concessions.

Jet streams turned into ribbons for a centenary.

Brisbane Airport marked its centenary on 2 April 2025 with a new brand identity, Campaign Brief reported, with Traffic Brand Agency consulting on the project. The airport’s communications team said the timing followed major work on both terminals and the long-running “Future BNE” programme, and described the previous logo as quite corporate and business-like; the new one was meant to signal anticipation and the possibilities of flying.

The new brandmark keeps the jet streams that had appeared in the airport’s logos for decades, now drawn as ribbons to suggest motion and freedom, Campaign Brief reported, and the colours of the ribbons follow a journey from land, over sea, to sky, mirroring a take-off. Traffic’s creative director said the wider design system takes its shapes from the airport apron, using them as containers for essential information. The new look was rolled out across terminal digital signs, social media and the airport website at bne.com.au, and the airport said old logos had been removed from thousands of locations around the site over several years.

The terminals carry their own design story. The redevelopment of the international terminal that began in February 2014 was designed by the Brisbane architecture practices Richards and Spence and Arkhefield, and Queensland artists Sebastian Moody and Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori were commissioned for its artworks, Wikipedia says. Campaign Brief called the airport Australia’s third-busiest aviation hub, and said about 20,000 people work on the site.

The name in daily use is simply Brisbane Airport, with the three-letter code BNE in the web address and the programme name; Brisbane Airport Corporation is the company behind it, and its shareholders sit one level further back.

For a design guide, Brisbane Airport shows how an airport can refresh a long-running symbol rather than replace it, keeping the jet streams while changing their form. Compare Sydney Airport, another Australian airport with a long history, and Schiphol, whose owner is one of Brisbane’s shareholders. For this guide we use a bay blue, a sand and a mangrove green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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