The Pots­damer Platz Quar­ter is one of the most vis­ited places in Berlin. Up to 100,000 peo­ple come here daily to ex­pe­ri­ence the unique mix of shop­ping, en­ter­tain­ment and cos­mopoli­tan flair – many of them are tourists, for whom ori­en­ta­tion around the 68,000 m2 space, in­clud­ing un­der­ground car parks, plays a ma­jor role. Moni­teurs won the com­pe­ti­tion to de­sign the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem with a for­mal and the­matic con­cept: the ra­dial pro­file of the signs is de­rived from the ty­pog­ra­phy of the neigh­bour­hood it­self. All three un­der­ground car parks were given clear des­ig­na­tions and a colour-coded re­struc­tur­ing, which also served to lighten the at­mos­phere of the spaces. Above ground and un­der­ground ori­en­ta­tion sys­tems now seam­lessly over­lap and the graph­ics and con­tent are in­ter­linked.

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.