TinyWins recaptures the dream of flight in Joby Aviation’s rebrand

The Brand Identity: Joby Aviation has spent the better part of a decade building an all-electric aircraft that takes off vertically, seats four passengers beside a pilot, cruises at up to 200mph and produces about as much noise as a conversation. The company designs, engineers and manufactures its critical components in-house through a production collaboration with Toyota, and has been working on the same certification process used for traditional aeroplanes and helicopters. For most of that time, the brand spoke to the people evaluating the technology, like investors, regulators and aviation partners.

But as commercial operations approached, Joby needed to talk to the people who would book the seats. California-based studio TinyWins, which had already been working with the company on smaller projects, took on the task of rebuilding the brand – from strategy and identity through to the website, app, wayfinding, skyport concepts and aircraft livery. “Until then, the conversation had been largely product-centric,” explains Bruno Arizio, Executive Creative Director at TinyWins. “But as Joby prepared to enter the consumer market, the brand needed to evolve from explaining the technology to expressing the experience.

The audience was shifting – from people evaluating the aircraft to people imagining themselves inside it.” Early conversations between the teams kept circling the same references, such as the sweeping curves of Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, the optimistic formal language of mid-century aviation design, and even The Jetsons. There was a quality in that era that resonated with the silhouette of the Joby aircraft itself. “When you’re introducing a new category of flight, people need a story they can anchor to,” Arizio reflects.

From those conversations, a narrative emerged: introduce a new aviation category by recapturing the dream of flight. Getting the aircraft right came first, according to the Joby team. Before any other touchpoint could succeed, people needed to understand and trust the technology. “The aircraft is the foundation of everything we do,” explains Kevin Funkhouser, Creative Director at Joby.

“Once people trust and understand the aircraft, how it works, how it’s designed and the standards behind it, we can build the rest of the customer-facing brand ecosystem, from the app to the skyport experience, on that foundation.” The brand’s strategic direction leaned into the emotional legacy of flight rather than leading with engineering specifications – a deliberate evolution from Joby’s historically technology-forward communications. “As we move closer to certification and carrying our first passengers, it became important to broaden the audience,” May Kodama, also Creative Director explains.

“We’re no longer speaking only to aviation or technology insiders; we’re speaking to future customers and communities.” The typography anchors the identity in that mid-century aviation lineage. TinyWins studied brand guidelines from Swissair by Rudolf Bircher, Lufthansa’s identity designed at HfG Ulm, and the British Airports Authority system by Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir. The team mapped the typefaces these programmes used and analysed specific construction details – the tails of the ‘a,’ the shoulders of ‘h’ and ‘m,’ terminal curves on the ‘y’ descender, number pairs and ligatures.

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Joby Aviation's rebrand represents a significant shift in strategy for a high-profile company in the emerging eVTOL market, making it highly impactful and relevant for brand strategy professionals.