Air­ports are mega-places where mil­lions of peo­ple move and cul­tures meet. They are places whose iden­tity is multi-lay­ered: On the one hand, the his­tory and the de­sign con­cept of the re­spec­tive coun­try can be read, al­most cliché-like lo­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics are con­densed and re­flect the po­si­tion­ing of a coun­try in the global struc­ture. On the other hand, air­ports rep­re­sent hy­per­mod­ern, func­tional en­vi­ron­ments in which processes are in­ter­na­tion­ally stan­dard­ized and max­i­mally ef­fi­cient with a fo­cus on en­ter­tain­ment and con­sump­tion.

This book re­flects on the cen­te­nary of civil avi­a­tion from the per­spec­tive of pas­sen­ger in­for­ma­tion and air­port iden­tity. Air­ports and Air­lines have to in­te­grate new con­cepts and tech­nolo­gies to sig­nif­i­cantly re­duce the in­dus­try’s car­bon foot­print while si­mul­ta­ne­ously en­sur­ing trav­eller safety. The tran­si­tion to a new era of avi­a­tion is hap­pen­ing now, and there is no doubt in our minds that de­sign, in­for­ma­tion de­sign and wayfind­ing will con­tinue to be es­sen­tial tools in this fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion. An­other mo­ti­va­tion for pub­lish­ing a book at this mo­ment.

1:1 – Sig­nage, Ori­en­ta­tion, Iden­tity is a spe­cial book. It not only de­scribes the pro­jects of the last ten years and the way of work­ing of Moni­teurs, but the pro­jects are also graph­i­cally brought into fo­cus: in this way the book shows Moni­teurs’ ori­en­ta­tion sys­tems on a 1 : 1 scale. The con­cepts of in­di­vid­ual pro­jects are pre­sented in short, con­cise texts with many pho­tographs and in­fo­graph­ics, while an in­ter­view with the three own­ers of the com­pany, Heike Nehl, Sibylle Schlaich and Isolde Frey, gives an in­sight into their ap­proach.

Un­der the su­per­vi­sion of Heike Nehl and Sibylle Schlaich, a group of stu­dents were chal­lenged to re­search the po­ten­tials of in­for­ma­tion de­sign. The brief was to crit­i­cally ex­am­ine this par­tic­u­lar topic for its spec­trum of pos­si­ble ap­pli­ca­tions, to ex­plore the every­day and mul­ti­ple uses. The stu­dents’ re­sults em­pha­sise the im­por­tance of sys­tem­atic in­for­ma­tion graph­ics for all ar­eas of our life and so­ci­ety. In this con­text, sci­en­tific data, in­struc­tion man­u­als, cal­en­dars, along with in­ter­ac­tive pro­grams and ex­per­i­men­tal films have been vi­su­alised.

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!