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Spirit Airlines is an ultra-low-cost airline built on a simple trade-off: lower fares in exchange for optional add-ons. While the business model was soundly understood internally, the brand struggled with public perception driven by confusion, surprise, and misaligned expectations. This engagement focused on supporting Spirit’s decision to embrace radical transparency, translating an unapologetic brand stance into clear, scalable creative execution across campaigns and digital experiences.
Rather than softening the message or repositioning the model, the work centered on making the value exchange unmistakable. Through disciplined art direction, campaign execution, website layout updates, and UX support, the project treated clarity as the product. The result was a brand and digital experience designed to help customers understand the deal quickly, confidently, and without apology, turning honesty into a usable brand advantage at scale.
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Spirit Airlines did not have a broken business model. It had a misunderstanding. While investors understood the economics, customers associated the brand with frustration, surprise fees, and noise.
To address this gap, Spirit publicly launched its Bare Fare campaign, an initiative (Barkley Agency) to explain its unbundled pricing structure and make the tradeoffs explicit, choosing transparency over apology, as documented in industry coverage of the airline’s repositioning and consumer education efforts (Adweek).
Leadership made a deliberate call to stop explaining the model through conventional airline language and start owning it outright. Low fares. Optional add-ons. No apologies.
That decision reframed the creative problem entirely. When a brand chooses provocation over reassurance, execution stops being expressive and starts becoming structural. Humor has to be precise. Design has to stay legible. Every touchpoint must reinforce understanding rather than amplify confusion. The task was to operationalize radical transparency into a visual and experiential system that could scale.
Spirit’s reputation already had momentum. The challenge was not inventing a new story, but reframing an existing one without breaking trust or usability.
We needed to educate customers without sounding defensive, express confidence without pretending the experience was something it was not, and modernize digital touchpoints so the brand voice felt intentional everywhere it appeared.
Brand strategy was defined by internal leadership. The creative strategy was executional: make Spirit instantly understandable.
The work leaned into radical transparency and self-aware humor, treating honesty as the hook and clarity as the payoff. Rather than trying to convert skeptics, the goal was recognition. If customers understood the tradeoff, the brand had done its job.
The Bare Fare (2014): visual editing, animation, and post-production contributions made by David Keyes. Copyright © Spirit Airlines. All rights reserved.
Execution focused on translating Spirit’s unapologetic stance into campaign creative and digital experiences that felt bold without becoming noisy. Website layouts and UX patterns prioritized fast comprehension, allowing humor and attitude to sit on top of an experience designed to work first and entertain second.
Developed campaign creatives, digital marketing assets, and interactive experiences that translated Spirit’s unapologetic stance into clear, attention-grabbing moments across channels, designed to invite reaction while reinforcing understanding at every touchpoint.
Refined landing pages, booking flows, and UX patterns using branded UI systems that prioritized clarity, speed, and decision-making, ensuring humor supported comprehension and confidence rather than distracting from the experience.
Created illustration and motion assets that modernized the brand voice while maintaining strict accessibility standards and a disciplined messaging hierarchy, allowing personality to show up without compromising legibility or trust.
This work was developed within a large, fast-moving brand organization. Internal leadership sets direction. Cross-functional teams moved quickly across channels. My role was to translate strategy into execution, protect creative quality, and ensure consistency as ideas moved from concept to live environments.
Spirit took intentional risks that ran counter to conventional airline marketing. The response proved the approach worked. By pairing transparency with disciplined execution, the campaigns generated attention, engagement, and measurable brand lift without softening the message.
When customers understood the deal, confidence followed.
Spirit did not attempt to soften its reputation. It clarified it. By treating execution as a system rather than a stunt, the work avoided provocation for provocation’s sake and focused instead on helping users understand the tradeoff quickly and confidently.
This project demonstrates how strong brands are built not by louder ideas, but by intentional execution across every moment where judgment is formed.
This case study explores how visual strategy, UX clarity, and campaign discipline support provocative brand positions in high-visibility consumer categories. It highlights the role of art direction and creative implementation in translating leadership-defined positioning into scalable digital experiences.
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