An independent archive of typography.
Topics
Formats
Typefaces

Tatort – “Verbrannt”

Contributed by Andreas Kofler on Oct 22nd, 2015. Artwork published in
October 2015
.
Tatort – “Verbrannt” 1
Source: ardmediathek.de ARD. License: All Rights Reserved.

Tatort (“crime scene”) is a German language police crime series. It has been continuously on the air since 1970, making it the longest-running TV-drama of Germany. Tatort is jointly produced by the ARD, a joint organisation of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters, the Austrian ORF and the Swiss SRF.

[…] every regional station contributes a number of episodes to a common pool. Therefore, the series is a collection of different police stories where different police teams each solve crimes in their respective city. Uniqueness in architecture, customs and dialects of the cities is therefore a distinctive part of the series and often the city, not the police force is the real main character of an episode. — Wikipedia

Due to this anthological concept, not only the narrative, the actors and the scenes of each episode vary, but also the design vocabulary and the titles of each subseries — with one exception: the iconic opening sequence, created by German graphic designer Kristina Böttrich-Merdjanowa in 1969. It concludes with a zoom into the logo of the series: “tatort” in custom-drawn lowercase letters loosely based on Futura Bold, with the ‘o’ centered in a crosshair.

This common sequence is followed by individual opening credits left to the discretion of each production team. The recent episode #957, Verbrannt, produced by the Hamburg-based NDR, made consistent and sober use of Interstate Bold.

Tatort – “Verbrannt” 2
Source: ardmediathek.de ARD. License: All Rights Reserved.
Tatort – “Verbrannt” 3
Source: ardmediathek.de ARD. License: All Rights Reserved.
Tatort – “Verbrannt” 4
Source: ardmediathek.de ARD. License: All Rights Reserved.
Tatort – “Verbrannt” 5
Source: ardmediathek.de ARD. License: All Rights Reserved.
Tatort – “Verbrannt” 6
Source: ardmediathek.de ARD. License: All Rights Reserved.

Typefaces

  • Futura
  • Interstate

Formats

Topics

Designers/Agencies

Artwork location

Post a comment