Delta Air Lines Pilot Trading Cards
Art Direction | Graphic Design | Product Strategy | Photography Retouching | Prototype & Testing
While on the Product & Experience Design team at Delta Air Lines, the brand was ready for a resurgence of its "secret" pilot trading cards — and I was brought on to lead the refresh. I had no idea that, within two years, the project would take on a life of its own: highly sought-after by collectors worldwide, covered in national press, and credited with reinvigorating the legacy of the cards for a new generation of fans. According to news coverage, the response even prompted other airlines to market or redesign their own versions.
I led creative direction and design execution for the campaign end to end, which went on to generate over 3.4 million social media views and measurable audience engagement — a rare case of a decades-old internal tradition becoming a full-blown cultural moment.
Research & Design Approach
The challenge was to honor the nostalgic, close-to-legacy feel longtime pilots and aviation enthusiasts expected, while designing something fresh enough to appeal to general card collectors. Working on Delta's Window Seat creative team, one of my favorite parts of the job was building these kinds of "surprise and delight" moments — real-time, in-house design work commissioned by the Marketing and Brand Engagement teams.
I spent time studying Delta's full aircraft fleet, reviewing technical schematics and feature sets for each model. Every plane had to be vectorized (and often redrawn) to fit the card format, which meant making deliberate calls about which details to keep and which to simplify for legibility at a small scale. We also worked out which fun facts would appear on the back of each card.
For creative inspiration, I looked to the broader resurgence of collectible culture — POPMART blind boxes, Pokémon, and the like — and to my own childhood collection of Marvel, Disney, and Star Wars cards, along with modern sets like Magic: The Gathering. It felt fitting that Delta was stepping into a category airlines weren't traditionally part of.
Delta Trading Cards Featured in People Magazine
Craft & Production
Bringing the cards to life meant close collaboration with printers to develop a layered production system that helped guard against counterfeits — an important detail once demand took off. Design-wise, I wove in subtle nods to runways and motion, tying back to Delta's brand mission at the time.
Every layout went through Adobe Illustrator with painstaking attention to rainbow foil placement and metallic outline work, built out as production-ready guides for manufacturing vendors. The goal throughout was a finish that felt genuinely premium and collectible — not just a corporate giveaway.
going viral 🌐 ✈️
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going viral 🌐 ✈️ 〰️
Going Viral
What started as an internal brand touch quickly spread across social media and collector communities, eventually landing coverage in People magazine.
Selection & The Full Set
I designed multiple style directions for the cards, which design leadership narrowed down to a handful of finalists. Delta pilots were then given the chance to vote on their favorite — a nice full-circle touch, since pilots were the original audience for the cards decades earlier. The winning design became the foundation for the complete 11-card set. True to the cards' "secret" tradition, there's no official checkout counter for them — passengers simply ask a pilot directly, choosing a courteous moment before or after the flight, and it's the perfect excuse to also thank the pilots and crew for getting them there safely.
