Lufthansa’s encircled bird may be the oldest airline logo still flying — and it predates the airline itself.

The stylised bird-in-a-circle was drawn in 1918 by architect Otto Firle, not for Lufthansa but for Deutsche Luft-Reederei, a predecessor that began flying in early 1919. (Curiously, Firle didn’t set out to draw a specific species; the “crane,” or Kranich, name only stuck around 1928.) The mark passed down to Deutsche Luft Hansa when it formed in 1926 and, refined but unmistakable, is still on the tail today — over a century later, one of the most enduring logos in the world.

In 1962, Lufthansa handed its identity to a design school — and got one of the first complete corporate-identity systems ever made.

Lufthansa commissioned the legendary Ulm School of Design (HfG Ulm) — specifically Otl Aicher‘s “Development Group 5” — and in 1962–63 they delivered a total system: the crane placed cleanly in its circle, a strict yellow, blue and grey palette, and Helvetica set rigorously on a grid across everything from tickets and timetables to signage and cutlery. It’s routinely cited as one of the most influential corporate-design programmes of the 20th century — the moment “a logo” became “a system.” (The yellow in the circle was an Aicher-era addition, not part of Firle’s original.)

A warm aviation yellow and a deep blue — with the balance between them recently reversed. Click a swatch to copy the hex.

The classic palette pairs Lufthansa yellow (commonly reproduced as #FFAD00) with a deep navy #05164D — reconstructed values, since Lufthansa’s brand manual isn’t public. The big recent change came in 2018, when studio Martin et Karczinski rebalanced the identity: blue became dominant (a darker, cooler navy) and yellow was demoted to an accent, while the crane was removed from the logotype but kept on the aircraft tail. It was controversial — proof that even a colour ratio is a serious brand decision. Copy the working values below.

Helvetica carried the brand for half a century before Lufthansa finally drew a typeface of its own.

Aicher’s team chose Helvetica in 1962–63, and it stayed Lufthansa’s voice for 50-plus years — a remarkable run for any typeface. With the 2018 rebrand, Lufthansa commissioned a bespoke family, “Lufthansa Corporate” (with display “Head” and reading “Text” styles), designed by Hannes von Döhren of HvD Fonts — explicitly built to carry Helvetica’s neutral DNA into a proprietary face the airline fully owns. It’s the classic modern move: keep the rational Swiss feel, but make it yours. The specimen below is set in a comparable neutral grotesque.

What made Aicher’s Lufthansa work was not a single logo but a rulebook precise enough to run an airline.

The genius of the Ulm programme was documentation. Aicher’s team did not just draw a mark; they produced an exhaustive corporate-identity manual that specified the grid, the exact use of Helvetica, the placement of the crane, and the yellow-and-blue system across every conceivable surface — tickets, timetables, signage, aircraft livery, even cutlery and crockery. That rigour meant a check-in desk in one country and a boarding pass in another looked unmistakably like the same company, drawn by the same hand. In an industry where a passenger’s trust is partly a trust in competence, that visual precision quietly did real commercial work.

It also explains why Lufthansa’s later changes were so closely watched. When Martin et Karczinski rebalanced the palette in 2018 — promoting blue, demoting yellow, keeping the crane on the tail — the debate was intense precisely because the original system had been so disciplined that even a shift in colour ratio counted as a serious edit. That is the paradox of a truly governed identity: its consistency becomes an asset so valuable that any adjustment feels weighty. For designers, Lufthansa remains the textbook case that a brand is not a picture but a system of decisions, written down clearly enough that hundreds of people can apply it faithfully without the original author in the room. Six decades on, the discipline Aicher codified is still the thing being argued over — which is its own kind of proof that it worked.

Keep Lufthansa’s system on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.