I went down a design rabbit hole. It started as some fun graphics, then looking up some history, and ended with me doing analysis and assembing the data because it didn’t exist. Welcome to the way my brain works.
I found these fantastic reproductions of Pan American World Airways luggage tags shared online. I wanted to learn more. Pan Am printed their luggage tags in at least 50 different colors. One color per city. A baggage handler on a ramp at Idlewild in 1962 learned to sort a cart of suitcases without reading a single word, based on these bold colors and lovely design work. Bangkok was hot pink. Dublin was shamrock green. Paris was a pale cerulean.
My guess is there was no legend or training manual. I bet they learned the system by handling bags.
I stumbled into this because of Ella Freire, a London-based screen printing artist who holds official Pan Am licensing and has spent years producing large-format reproductions of original 1960s tags. Her collection is gorgeous. It is also, as far as I can tell, the most complete visual record of the original color system that exists outside of museum archives and collector forums. I wanted to know what the actual colors were. Not as art objects on a gallery wall. As hex codes I could use.
So I built the palette myself.
The system
Every tag used three constant colors. Navy (#003052) for the majority of the city names and IATA code. Red (#D90D0C) for the claim check number. Cream (#F1EAD1) for the paper stock. Every tag, every city, every year I could find with this format. The primary variable was a single field of color behind the text. That field was the city’s identity.
Three colors and one variable solved a multi-destination wayfinding problem I had never thought about. There were some unique variations (shown below). But as I dug into the concept, I love that the discipline was in what stayed the same, not in what changed.
Where the rules broke (and why)
Six tags deviate from the three-ink system, and each deviation has a legibility reason behind it.
Moscow’s swatch is a saturated red. Printing a red claim check number on a red field would have been illegible, so the ink switched to blue.
Sydney’s tag and a couple of others is striped, and it inverts the text and number colors. Red text on the striped field, navy for the claim check. The inversion creates better figure-ground separation against the patterned background. A striped layout breaks the solid-field assumption, so the color assignments shift to compensate.
Havana’s dark variant prints cream-colored text on a deep blue swatch (or perhaps it is transparent text?). The field is so dark that navy text would disappear. The reversed is the only option that preserves readability.
Dubai, Buenos Aires, and Tel Aviv all use striped layouts with non-standard accent colors. I believe these are later-era tags where the graphic format expanded, but the logic is consistent: when the layout changes, the color assignments change with it, always in service of contrast.
These exceptions prove the system was governed by a principle, not a formula. The principle was legibility at distance. When the formula would have violated the principle, the formula gave way. There was no computer picking off of a palette in Adobe back then, though. I’d love to hear the process and who was responsible for setting this up.
Reconstructing the palette
Nobody had compiled these colors into a usable format that I could find. Freire’s prints were my primary source. I eyedropper-sampled the dominant swatch color from each tag’s product photography, along with the text, field, and number colors.
The problem with sampling colors from product photography is that every image carries its own lighting, white balance, and compression artifacts. An eyedropper gives you what the camera saw, not what the ink was.
But there was a fix built into the system itself.
Those three constant colors appear on every tag – navy, red, and cream. If the navy text on a Tokyo tag reads darker than the navy on a Miami tag, that difference is in the photograph, not the ink. I sampled all three reference colors from each tag, measured their distance from the target values in CIELAB (a perceptually uniform color space), averaged the errors, and applied the correction to each swatch from that same image.
Forty-two of 51 text samples clustered within a tight band around #003052. Thirty of 50 field samples hit #F1EAD1 exactly. Forty-eight of 51 number samples fell in the red band around #D90D0C. The system inks were remarkably consistent across decades. The photographs were not. The correction worked because the redundancy was already there, waiting for me to get curious!
Why an architect cares about luggage tags
I’m also designing beer can labels, so this felt like a little bit of a mix of worlds, but that’s not entirely true. I design housing and plan for growth. I’m discussing bigger pictures and long time frames. Details that provide sustainability and permanence. Managing construction costs with energy use and values. The things that stay constant are the things that make the buildings work. The things that vary are the things that make them fit different sites and different households.
Ultimately, I loved the idea that the system existed at all, and then we have the evidence for how it was used, how it was broken, and why it lasted as a useful tool. A designed object that serves a purpose, adapts to it’s needs, and also looks really cool. Why wouldn’t an Architect care about that?!
The palette
Fifty cities. Corrected hex values. A full spectrum from Havana’s dark navy (#003A86) through Melbourne’s leaf green (#70AB35) and Barbados yellow (#FBDD25) to Geneva’s signal red (#FF0006). The complete palette, the raw eyedropper data, the corrected values, and the method documentation are available as a free palette to download here. [Google Drive Link].
Design systems that embed their own calibration data are more durable than systems that don’t. Pan Am’s three constant colors let me reconstruct their palette 60 years after the airline ceased operations, which is pretty neat. The redundancy was not waste, because it turned into infrastructure. Show me what you make with it!
And I’ll think about all of this when I draw wall sections.
-Scott Hand, AIA
Trilobite Design