Image Caption: Katherine McCoy, Ticket Counter Poster at Frontier Airlines, Saint Louis, 1968

 

Post: This is a poster at the ticket counter for Frontier Airlines. It was designed while Katherine McCoy was at Unimaker Design in 1967. She designed this poster to hang over the ticket counter, and it was commissioned by Frontier through Unimaker. This project partnering with Frontier is significant because it shows how influential McCoy’s education in industrial design was in her earlier work. In this poster, one can see the influences that Unimaker’s European design staff had on McCoy and her work. The poster has a Swiss influence, which can be seen in the typography used on the bottom corners as well as on the top half of the middle of the poster. In addition, there is a focus on corporate identity that is present in this design, By incorporating the name of the airline, Frontier, as a large portion of the design, McCoy is showing how corporate identity can be used in graphic design. McCoy uses the same colors for the Frontier logo as she did on the main picturorial portion of the picture in order to show the important role that the logo plays in the poster. In addition, McCoy includes the skyline of Saint Louis in order to show how she trained in industrial graphic design. By placing the Frontier logo on the negative white space of the poster, McCoy is making it so one’s eyes are drawn to the logo, and thus the name of the airline. This shows how corporate identity is important in this work for McCoy. McCoy also focused on communication design in this poster. By including the skyline of Saint Louis, as well as labeling the skyline under it, McCoy is communicating the viewer one of the mant destinations one can travel to with Frontier. In addition, she included a list of destinations in the top portion of the negative white space in the middle of the poster. By doing this, she is communicating to the viewer the destinations that one can visit with Frontier airlines. McCoy’s focus on communication design, corporate identity, and industrial design are presented here in this poster, as well as her influences from Swiss typography and the European designers at Unimaker.