ADAC roadmaps and city guides

With more than 18 million members, the ADAC (Allgemeiner Deutscher Automobil-Club e.V.) is Europe’s largest automobile club. For many years – approximately from the 1980s to the early 2000s – the ADAC used Times Modern for almost all its publications. The heavy display face adorns countless covers of travel guides, folding maps and route planners, but also less ephemeral editions like atlases and touristic coffee table books.

While the Suhrkamp paperback series by Willy Fleckhaus is considered to be the most iconic use of Times Modern, I’d argue that an even wider audience was exposed to this typeface via the ubiquitous ADAC maps. Since the mid 2000s, the ADAC has phased out Times Modern and replaced it with Frutiger, but sometimes also with Myriad, FF Fago and other sans-serifs.