Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich taught as guest pro­fes­sors in China at the CDK (the Chi­nese Ger­man Art Acad­emy in Hangzhou) – a co­op­er­a­tion pro­ject be­tween the UdK Berlin (Berlin Uni­ver­sity of the Arts) and the CAA (Chi­nese Art Acad­emy), their work con­cerned the sub­ject of air­ports and new cre­ative ap­proaches to vastly dif­fer­ent fields of de­sign. Their lec­tures in­cluded all com­mu­ni­ca­tion me­dia em­ployed at an air­port, in­fo­graph­ics, ori­en­ta­tion sys­tems, the cor­po­rate de­sign of an air­port, the cor­po­rate de­sign of an air­line, dig­i­tal me­dia such as apps, in­fo­graph­ics on the air­field and the graph­i­cal use of space.

Dur­ing the sum­mer se­mes­ter of 2008, Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich taught at the Bauhaus-Uni­ver­sity Weimar. To­gether with ap­prox­i­mately 20 stu­dents, they or­gan­ised and de­signed the ty­pog­ra­phy-con­gress “Ding­bats Black to Light!”, which is now be­ing car­ried out for the fifth time. Posters, in­vi­ta­tion cards, web­sites and t-shirts, all pro­mo­tional ma­te­r­ial cre­ated for this event, re­volved around the same topic: Ding­bats! Lit­tle bats, those par­tic­u­lar birds that breath live into the al­pha­bet, who met in crowds at the E-Werk Weimar, ven­tured into the dark­ness of the hall, to do good (for the world of ty­pog­ra­phy), bat­man-style!

The lec­ture given by Sibylle Schlaich and Heike Nehl at the Vi­sion Plus Con­fer­ence of the IIID (In­ter­na­tional In­sti­tute for In­for­ma­tion De­sign) in Vi­enna is about de­sign­ing pic­tograms within an in­ter­na­tional and his­tor­i­cal con­text. Pic­tograms are an im­por­tant part of com­mu­ni­ca­tion at an air­port in that they help to over­come lan­guage bar­ri­ers. They in­flu­ence the vi­sual iden­tity, be­cause they com­mu­ni­cate in a lan­guage which fits to each par­tic­u­lar air­port and coun­try. It is in­ter­est­ing how their mo­tifs, aside from the de­sign and char­ac­ter­is­tics, al­ways change to match the needs and cir­cum­stances. Stan­dards, DIN stan­dards and test pro­ce­dures help to check and to stan­dard­ise com­pre­hen­si­bil­ity and rec­og­niz­abil­ity.