Call me crazy: I create airline liveries for fun
The story of a how my teenage hobby got me here.
Call me a geek. Call me a dork. Call me boring.
Yes I create airline liveries for fun.
When I started AvDOG, I knew I wanted this to be a side project. I have a full-time teaching job during the day and I come back at night to my dad duties. Once the kids are asleep and my wife and I have had our wind-down, or both of us agree we each need some desperate me time, I start working on The AvDOG. It’s been a place for the past couple of months for me just to have a creative outlet and write about the aviation industry and avgeekery. I wasn’t gonna post click-bait, I’m not chasing to be a mega influencer or go viral, I just wanted to write and share the quirks and ins and outs of avgeekery to whoever wanted to hear.
It turned out much harder than expected. I gave myself a goal of two posts a week, but in reality it was one post per week. I wanted this to remain a side project so I wasn’t going to push myself, AvDOG is supposed to be good for my mental health and not raise my blood pressure. Whenever I had some spare time, I would jot down some notes or edit some posts. Nothing has really gone viral, and I am consoling myself that this is a side hobby and it’s okay, those who want to read it will eventually find it.
But now it’s summer holidays and with a little bit more time on my hands, I decided it's time to dive into what really makes avgeekery fun for me: liveries.
My livery journey started about 20 years ago, when I used to draw my own fictional liveries as a young boy. As all kids with weird hobbies experience, my parents swiftly discredited them. But it all changed one day. I found a website called cardatabase.com/modifiedairlinerphotos (I have no idea how I remembered it back in the day but I swiftly bookmarked the page on my then new Mozilla Firefox browser) where there were hundreds of geeks like me that made fictional liveries and weird aircraft photoshop edits. I taught myself the ins and outs with how to download a template and create a livery using a lowly Microsoft Paint and uploaded onto the site using the pseudonym Raydon Designs.
Unfortunately, most of my files are (hopefully) on some old computer in my parents’ house back in South Africa but luckily I managed to salvage some of my childhood designs from 2008/2009 as I was about to finish high school.
I still remember my parents telling me to study instead of drawing useless airplane pictures. Looking back, they were pretty atrocious. Firstly, that’s not even a Boeing 737-200, that’s a -400. But one day, one of the university students taught me how to use Photoshop. I realised I could use different gradients and shading to manipulate liveries into actual designs. A year or two later, my designs got better:
I decided to have more fun and experiment with different designs and aircraft types. Some of my designs were even mistaken for actual renditions or news on various forums. Unfortunately the website modifiedairlinerphotos (MAP) shut down and I stopped uploading online in my university years. However, some of my designs were downloaded and found their way on Pinterest or just various random websites online. This one still remains my favourite, how everyone thinks that I made an actual render of the Boeing 777X more than a decade ago and it still hasn’t entered into service.
Almost a decade later, I found one of the original admins of MAP that created an Instagram account using the modifiedairlinerphoto handle. The style was so similar to what I’d seen on MAP back in the day I knew it was like the old online friend that I never met. The livery design spark was reignited and I had to find a way to get my designs out there.
I had various iterations; Raydon, KUMOYA, Kreativity, Air Plain Views… none really stuck and my liveries all came and went. I found it very difficult to balance liveries and my normal human life. As a teenager whose only responsibility was to study, it was easy for me to churn out five liveries a day. Now, not so much.
With AvDOG, I found the balance to write and design as I have time and forgive myself when I don’t get to it. So with the summer holidays I decided to relaunch my liveries once again under the AvDOG brand. Over the past week I posted my designs on Instagram again, I cleaned them up and used AI to generate 3D views. In addition to posting on Instagram I also posted them on Threads. The response has been… mixed.
Let’s start with what hasn’t changed. I still love designing liveries, whether it’s imagining airlines operating new aircraft, concept liveries, retro liveries or all of the above. I still use my signature registration, some combination of S, K and H, unless I want to have some fun like my recent HKexpress upload. I still try and pay attention to details as much as I can or am able to.
Now the fun part. When we had MAP, it was very much one way. We’d post our designs and wouldn’t hear feedback unless it was posted on airliners.net (and it happened to me before, thanks for tearing down a teenage boy’s avgeek dream guys!)
Now, everyone has a voice. Some of the response has been good, some less so. Either way, I still find it very amusing there is now a very active livery police force hiding behind their screens and keyboards criticising fictional liveries. Some people can be quite blunt in their comments, someone even took the effort to put my design next to a sketch to tell me my dimensions were wrong (they weren’t). But in this day and age I guess any feedback is good (ask Ryanair) and it’s something that I will have to get used to now.
I’ll admit, some of my designs are controversial, but I live in a “what-if” world, reimagining what the world of airlines would look like if we bothered to imagine it. A new airline livery will hardly have everyone on the same page anyway; some will like it, some will hate it. So while some of my designs aren’t even real, I understand if they can be somewhat polarizing.
So either way, I hope you enjoy the Gallery, where I will showcase my designs. I will also have some in-depth analysis of my designs here on TheAvDOG.com. As a benefit for paid subscribers, I’ll be accepting livery requests and getting to them as soon as dad life, work life, and bedtime struggles allow. I’ve already got one request in the queue.