40,000 peo­ple, 17,000 apart­ments: the Märkische Quar­ter in Berlin places great de­mands on ori­en­ta­tion. The large hous­ing de­vel­op­ment was de­signed in the 1960s by na­tion­ally and in­ter­na­tion­ally recog­nised ar­chi­tects. Build­ings of the same con­struc­tion type bor­der onto sev­eral streets and are con­nected through large court­yards and parks. The owner, Gesobau, wanted an ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem that not only made it eas­ier for peo­ple to find their way but also, through sim­ple and friendly de­sign, en­hanced the im­age of the neigh­bour­hood and strength­ened the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of the res­i­dents with their neigh­bour­hood. To­gether with the pro­duc­tion de­sign­ers Gries and von Kamptz, Moni­teurs de­vel­oped a fam­ily of signs and a colour street map of the area. Ground plans mark the walk­ways and the fa­cil­i­ties of the in­fra­struc­ture.

Moni­teurs not only de­signed the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem in­side, but also out­side the build­ing – from the signs for foot pas­sen­gers and cy­clists to the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem for the car parks. The con­sis­tent ap­pli­ca­tion of a sin­gle graphic con­cept cre­ates a uni­form ap­pear­ance for the en­tire air­port site. The pic­togram fam­ily icons were ex­panded to in­clude site-spe­cific lo­ca­tions such as the vis­i­tor cen­tre and the Air­port City.

Adler­shof is Ger­many’s most mod­ern en­tre­pre­neur and tech­nol­ogy cen­tre, with over 900 com­pa­nies and or­gan­i­sa­tions from acad­e­mia, busi­ness and the me­dia. This di­ver­sity is re­flected in coloured signs that greet every vis­i­tor. To make it pos­si­ble to nav­i­gate from the cen­tral street of Rudower Chaussee, Moni­teurs, to­gether with prod­uct de­signer Axel Ku­fus, de­signed an ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem that bor­rows from the ar­che­type of the leg­i­ble sign: the clas­sic sign­post. For the signs, Moni­teurs adopted the ex­ist­ing colour cod­ing of each of the quar­ters of Adler­shof. A smaller sign at the top also shows the way to a cen­tral in­for­ma­tion point.