SC&CO worked with photographer Jim Krantz and the Flight Test Historical Foundation on the digital experience behind a limited edition created to fund the new Air Force Flight Test Museum at Edwards Air Force Base.
Krantz’s photographs of the SR-71A Blackbird and the F-117A Nighthawk were embedded beneath the surface of Modernica’s fiberglass shell chair, a 1948 form still hand-made in Los Angeles by the original methods. Each edition carried an engraved data plate and the signatures of the test pilots who flew the aircraft.
Two audiences were being asked to act at once: the aviation community, who understood the aircraft and the pilots, and the design collector, who understood the chair and the print. A charity giving ladder undersells the object. A retail checkout undersells the cause.
We designed the donation page as a gallery product page rather than a fundraising form. The object takes half the screen, presented as a work rather than as merchandise. A single black bar reading Make Donation holds the primary action, so the philanthropic act stays explicit while everything around it carries the discipline of high-end furniture retail. Details, Dimensions, Lead Time and Shipping sit as quiet tabs beneath, answering the collector’s practical questions without crowding the object. Provenance was treated as content, not as small print: designer and photographer credits were given standing above the fold, so the buyer meets the makers before they meet the price.
Headlines were set in Yeager, a display face named for the test pilot who first broke the sound barrier over the desert that became Edwards Air Force Base. It is the museum’s own ground and its founding story, carried in the name of the typeface. Its squared, stencilled forms echo an instrument panel or an engraved data plate, giving the page an engineering voice without a single insignia or piece of livery.
That was the point of the exercise. This was the first work of its kind for the Foundation, and the system built here became the groundwork for what followed: the typographic voice, the editorial restraint, the paired treatment of artefact and artwork, and the principle that provenance is the content. It set the design language the Air Force Flight Test Museum would carry forward.
The editions sold out - By framing the transaction as an acquisition rather than an appeal, the project lifted the value of the average gift well beyond what a conventional donation page achieves, raising over $200,000 toward Phase 2 of the new museum. Donors became collectors and named contributors, recognised on the museum wall and holding an object with genuine secondary-market standing. It gave a regional aviation museum a credible route into the design and photography markets, a repeatable model for future editions, and a visual language to build on.