In 1965, long before Apple’s design chief Jonny Ive took control of both the form and function of his company’s products, Braniff Airways turned to the designer Alexander Girard to create a corporate identity that could function as the company’s strategy. The plan they hatched was called “The End of the Plain Plane”; Girard delivered. He gave the planes eye-popping colors, designed the furniture in the ticket offices and airport lounges (the Apple Stores of their day), and even defined the size of the sugar packets. Through Girard, Braniff succeeded for a time in defining the look and feel of the future. (It’s worth noting that Ive’s close friend and collaborator on the Apple Watch, Australian designer Marc Newson, is also the creative director of Qantas Airways.)

Soon, that era would end. Its icons are preserved in Matthias C. Hühne’s jumbo-sized design book, Airline Visual Identity 1945-1975 (Callisto). Documenting the changing liveries and identities of thirteen global airlines, Hühne’s monograph spares no expense in replicating Girard’s metallic purple posters for Braniff Airways and Manfred Bingler’s color-drenched images of a Manhattan skyscraper or serene Matterhorn for Swissair. The result is a labor of love, costing as much as a trans-continental plane ticket ($400).

Aside from its sheer design pornography, this coffee table-buster is intriguing for the parallels it evokes between the glamour of the Jet Age and the halo around computing today—both are the result of designers whose talents transcended the product itself.

Consider, for example, the case of United Airlines in 1973. Several decades before “design thinking” entered mainstream business jargon, United Airlines hired design firm Saul Bass & Associates to overhaul its image. CEO Edward E. Carlson, who had taken control of America’s largest carrier a few years earlier, carped to the legendary designer about the seemingly random use of stripes across its livery.

“To me,” Bass later recalled, “this was like someone saying, ‘I’ve got this large corporation and something funny is going on in the mail room.’” He added, “It was clear the stripes were part of a larger problem—the lack of any coherent point of view of what the airline should look like.” Bass’s solution was the “tulip,” the blue-and-orange interlaced U-shaped logo that was the carrier’s hallmark through federal deregulation, bankruptcy, and its merger with Continental Airlines in 2010.