The FAZ, Frank­furter All­ge­meine Zeitung, is Germany’s most pres­ti­gious news­pa­per. Con­ser­v­a­tive in its pol­i­tics, pro­gres­sive (or enlight­ened?) in its cov­er­age of The Arts. For the Fed­eral Republic’s 60^th anniver­sary this week­end they ded­i­cated a com­plete sec­tion to the work of com­mu­ni­ca­tion design­ers. They write about the “face of the new Ger­many” say­ing that (and I quote loosely) Our true ori­en­ta­tion sys­tems are pic­tures from daily life. Over the Fed­eral Republic’s sixty years design­ers have done more for the self-image of Ger­mans than all other professions.

Among the illus­tra­tions is the sys­tem of type­faces that I designed with Chris­t­ian Schwartz and that was awarded the Fed­eral Design Prize because – as the jury put it – “it rep­re­sented a major con­tri­bu­tion to the country’s visual culture”.

The FAZ’s cover page for 23 May 2009 shows a pho­to­graph of a piece of Berlin’s pub­lic tran­sit dia­gramm, “after a design by Erik Spiek­er­mann”. That is true, but only half the story. I lead the team that, in 1990, designed the pas­sen­ger infor­ma­tion sys­tem for the BVG (Berlin Tran­sit Author­ity) in the re-united city. I was respon­si­ble for the main para­me­ters, like type­faces, logos, colours, and over­all design lan­guage. The art­work for the dia­gramme was done by Brigitte Hartwig, now a pro­fes­sor at Dessau. The up-to-date dia­gramme (it is not a map!) is down­load­able here.