8 Min Lesezeit

The corporate design of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) tells a story of change and reunification. The book ‘Berlin ist Gelb’ documents how design created orientation and redefined a city brand in the 1990s – a look back at a design process that went far beyond colour.

by Thomas Edelmann

Erik Spiekermann in the Gleisdreieck underground station (with info book by Albrecht Ecke), 1992 / Photo: Stefan Schilling

How did design help reunite two public transport companies that had operated together until 1949? Berlin is Yellow is a comprehensive 447-page documentary that explores the design history of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) and the design processes that led to its transformation in the early 1990s. Colour is just one aspect, one of many.

Erik Spiekermann, 2024 / Photo: BVG, Oliver Lang

The Beginnings: Design and the Appearance of a City

The story begins in 1980, when François Burkhardt, architect, author and then founding director of the IDZ Berlin, invited urban companies and design studios to a colloquium. The theme was ‘Changing the visual appearance of a city’. The transport company, which at the time operated bus and underground lines in western Berlin, also presented its advertising activities. MetaDesign and its two co-founders, Erik Spiekermann and Florian Fischer, were also present. They noticed a huge discrepancy between the “high material standard” of the BVG at the time and the real-life jumble of visual forms, from bus stops to rudimentary orientation elements. The designers offered to help. Letters were exchanged – they are facsimiles in the book. The BVG referred to unchangeable standards, a lack of responsibility and a lack of resources. Sorry, no orders could be placed! But the designers kept at it. Why should such an important public company present itself so badly in their city? With perseverance and confidence in good examples, they took part in small individual projects that were more of a research nature and led to barely perceptible improvements.

A Memorable Performance

They stayed in touch, which led to a 50-minute MetaDesign presentation at BVG in 1987. Bodo Baumgart, one of the authors of the book, who was working in marketing at BVG at the time, remembers Erik Spiekermann’s presentation: “He then tried to explain to those present the need for a standardised information system and a new corporate design – but nobody was really interested in that at the time. (…) With his direct manner, he managed to insult every department head at least once within 15 minutes. Everyone was on their toes, but of course it backfired. (…) The only good thing was that Erik was remembered by some people who remembered him later, after the fall of the wall.

„The only good thing was that Erik was remembered by some people who remembered him later, after the fall of the wall.“

Bodo Baumgart, one of the authors of the book, at the time working in marketing at a BVG

Vehicles and their details, 1993 / Photo: BVG, Oliver Lang

Parallel Worlds: Design in East Berlin

Almost at the same time, an interdisciplinary working group led by graphic designer Jörg Grote and architect Stefan Weiß in the eastern part of Berlin was working on the incoherent design solutions of the Berlin transport companies there. In order to counteract the ‘neglect of public space’, they developed signage systems and information carriers of high design quality, which they published in GDR trade journals. Apart from individual projects, which they were also able to accompany creatively, Grote and Weiß’s approach remained at the project stage. Everyone was intellectually interested, but no one wanted to make it happen,” Stefan Weiß sums up in an interview.

A Failed Reboot

In 1988, the BVG ventured a fundamentally new approach in the West. After Spiekermann’s appearance, a marketing agency was commissioned with the basic idea of moving away from the different shades of yellow on the vehicles and instead painting them all white and adding a yellow line all round. The stationery was to change accordingly. The traditional BVG logo with the bear and a stone crown consisted of just three letters with yellow spots on the sides, the ‘fried eggs’. The design failed in politics and in public. There were costs, but no positive public image. The agency’s designs – which are documented in the book – meant that for years the BVG was no longer allowed to talk about corporate design. It was not until the fall of the Berlin Wall that ‘suddenly and unexpectedly’, as Erik Spiekermann recalls, the urban normality was restored. A challenge for both transport companies: routes once again ran from one part of the city to the other. How were bus drivers and passengers supposed to find their way around the other part of the city? Spiekermann and MetaDesign came to mind. Individual projects were launched, each of which meant an improvement for customers and companies. Design made information accessible and created unity.

Bringing the Vision to Life

In 1992, Erik Spiekermann presented the BVG board with his several metres long three-column ‘wallpaper’, which brought together all the basic design elements and individual tasks in a single overview. The taboo was broken: a corporate design was created that was able to reduce costs by reducing the number of buttons, materials and colours. ‘Sun yellow’ was chosen as the uniform colour for trams, buses and underground vehicles, which Spiekermann described in an interview with the taz newspaper as ‘garish yellow’.

Although the typographer, type designer, entertainer, strategist and now operator of a typographic workshop Spiekermann is at the centre of the work, it is not about a cult of personality. Co-authors are Lars Krüger, the aforementioned Bodo Baumgardt and Axel Mauruszat. Krüger’s master’s thesis in communication design at Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences from 2011 forms the basis for the book design. Baumgardt took part in the presentation of MetaDesign as a BVG marketing employee in 1987 and was later responsible for its realisation as deputy head of the department. In the early 1990s, he changed sides before founding his own consultancy firm for transport companies in 1995. Another author is BVG employee Mauruszat, who heads the historical archive and runs a private online archive on Berlin’s public transport system.

Axel Mauruszat, Erik Spiekermann and Lars Krüger, 2024 / Photo: BVG, Oliver Lang

Tour of the authors with BVG CD managers Nicole Christ and Anja Wüstner, 2024 / Photo: BVG, Oliver Lang

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Book

The work is valuable because it makes accessible intermediate steps, personal recollections and historical documents that would otherwise lie buried in archives. Spiekermann’s epilogue is followed by an appendix of 90 pages of interviews and conversations in which participants from various hierarchical levels – both agency and client – have their say. Occasionally the material gets out of hand; references to the world outside the capital are rare. Alongside a visual history of the company, there are historical examples of architecture and design from different phases. They show how the client and the agency approached the subject and which milestones they created in the realisation.

What is not mentioned is that MetaDesign redesigned Potsdam’s trams and buses with the simplest of means and with rapid results. The ‘crystal blue’ ET 480 S-Bahn carriage for the BVG S-Bahn (West) from 1985 is shown without the name of the designer, Herbert Lindinger, being mentioned. He tried to give the S-Bahn a contemporary colour scheme, but was thwarted by traditionalists. Lindinger designed the cars for the Stuttgart S-Bahn in a rich broom yellow – a few years before the colour standardisation of the Berlin fleet.

One of the first illustrations in the book shows the actual word mark of the Aboag bus company, a logo from 1928. According to the caption, it dates from 1902, which is a harmless mistake. However, another caption attributes the renaming of Stalinallee in 1961 to ‘Stalin’s war crimes’.

The timetables, route maps and bus signs designed by MetaDesign, 1991 / © BVG Historical Archive

Today’s Problems

BVG, while still Berlin’s fourth largest employer, is now facing new problems and is seen as unreliable by long-term users. Employees complain about communication and a lack of appreciation from managers. Digital services are up-to-date in terms of design, but often functionally unsatisfactory. Trains and buses are cancelled, information is incorrect, digitally purchased tickets disappear from mobile devices. All this is another story, as is the fact that politicians are unable or unwilling to provide adequate funding for their mobility company.

The BVG’s ‘Because we love you’ slogan, which came out of a clever social media campaign, has been considered by many to be hackneyed for the past ten years. So it’s good to see Rayan Abdullah’s precise BVG logo on the book cover, rather than the obtrusive yellow heart that BVG uses to praise itself. All in all, BVG’s corporate design seems to have aged well, at least where it has been sensibly maintained and extended digitally.

The book is an encouragement to anyone who wants to avoid superficial blah-blah and half-baked logos when transforming brands. Anyone interested in context, design, language, institutional resistance and how to overcome it will find good ideas here.

And Spiekermann? The world-famous typographer left MetaDesign in 2000 in a dispute, founded new, successful companies, created well-known typefaces, for example for Deutsche Bahn, and continues to shape international debates, often via digital channels. He still has criticisms to make. It took a long time, but some things could be better,” he says of the current state of BVG’s corporate design. He is omnipresent in the book, yet he does not speak until page 343: Never before have I been able to work so constructively,’ he writes, and ‘for me as a designer, this is the best job of my life.

Berlin ist Gelb.
Das Corporate Design der Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe: Entstehung und Gegenwart

(English: “Berlin Is Yellow. The Corporate Design of the Berlin Public Transport Company: Origins and Present”)

By Lars Krüger, Bodo Baumgardt, Erik Spiekermann, Axel Mauruszat, 
Herausgeber Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG)

Jovis Verlag, Berlin, 2024

ISBN 978-3-98612-218-8

55 Euro

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About the Author

Thomas Edelmann was born in 1963 and lives and works in Hamburg, Germany. He is interested in the design aspects of mobility as well as historical topics and current developments in circular design. A career changer, he started writing about cars, graphic and product design. He is particularly interested in designers who work in more than one field. From 1996 to 2001 he was editor-in-chief of design report magazine, which was published until 2019. Today he teaches design theory and history at the AMD Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg.


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