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.

This book, pub­lished by the type de­sign­ers Alexan­der Branczyk, Jutta Nachtwey, Heike Nehl, Sibylle Schlaich and Jür­gen Siebert, and de­signed by Moni­teurs, fea­tures por­traits of in­ter­na­tional type de­sign­ers and their lat­est fonts. emo­tion­al_dig­i­tal is both a ref­er­ence work and a guide to the fu­ture of type de­sign. Its lay­out is pre­cise and at­mos­pheric, al­low­ing each type to be shown with its full vi­sual po­ten­tial. Alexan­der Branczyk con­ducted stud­ies on two clas­sic fonts ex­clu­sively for this book.

In the e-book, Moni­teurs pre­sents the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem for the “Berlin Bran­den­burg Air­port.” Four chap­ters ex­plain how the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem re­flects the ar­chi­tec­tural iden­tity of the air­port: “Iden­tity” deals with the ar­chi­tec­ture, the world of colour, and the de­vel­op­ment of font and pic­tograms; “Func­tion” ex­plains how the font is used, which types and sizes are used, and how ori­en­ta­tion at the air­port works for the vis­i­tors and pas­sen­gers. The chap­ter “De­vel­op­ment” shows how the sig­nage and text were tested and man­u­fac­tured, e.g. for read­abil­ity, us­ing test-ste­les. “Be­yond the Ter­mi­nal” shows how the ori­en­ta­tion sys­tem af­fects not only the ter­mi­nals them­selves, but also the other build­ings, parts of build­ings and the sur­round­ing ar­eas, the roads to and from the air­port, as well as in­ter­net ac­cess points and flight in­for­ma­tion mon­i­tors. Us­ing a wide ar­ray of im­ages, in­ter­ac­tive graph­ics and videos, the dig­i­tal ver­sion of the book al­lows us to ex­plain every­thing in great de­tail. The e-book is avail­able as iBook and ePub ver­sion.