Buses, the underground and the trams were brought under one roof in 1928.

The BVG, short for Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, runs the underground, the trams and the buses of Berlin. English Wikipedia describes it as a state-owned company whose owner is the State of Berlin, and German Wikipedia says it has been a public-law institution, an Anstalt des öffentlichen Rechts, since 1994.

The company was formed to end a patchwork. German Wikipedia says that before Greater Berlin was created in 1920 the city’s transport was run by separate firms, among them the privately founded Allgemeine Berliner Omnibus-Actien-Gesellschaft of 1868, the elevated and underground railway company of 1897 known as the Hochbahngesellschaft, and a number of tram operators, and that there were neither coordinated timetables nor coordinated tariffs between them. It says the Berliner Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft, the original BVG, was founded on 10 December 1928 to bring the three under one roof and began operating on 1 January 1929. English Wikipedia gives the same three founding operators and says that on 1 January 1938 the company was renamed Berliner Verkehrs-Betriebe, keeping the acronym BVG.

The postwar division of the city split the company too. German Wikipedia says a separate BVG administration formed in East Berlin on 1 August 1949, trading from 1969 as the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVB). After reunification, it says, BVG (West) and BVB (East) merged on 1 January 1992 under the name Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe.

A Kreuzberg studio’s long pitch, and a city painted sun yellow.

The BVG’s look was the work of MetaDesign, the Berlin studio co-founded by Erik Spiekermann, and it took years to win. TypoJournal, in an article by Lars Krüger published on 13 December 2011, said Spiekermann and Florian Fischer tried as early as 1980 to convince the management of the western BVG that its passenger information and corporate design were in poor shape. The magazine said that in autumn 1983 a Berlin Senate research project called Stadtinfo studied passenger information on bus line 9 between Zoologischer Garten and Tegel airport, with MetaDesign designing the information at stops and on vehicles, and that in summer 1987 the studio sent the BVG an unsolicited concept for a unified information system, which was not taken up.

The fall of the Wall changed the brief. TypoJournal reported that after November 1989 the BVG gave MetaDesign the job of a visually unified passenger guidance system for the reunified company, and quoted Spiekermann recalling that the studio won the contract in 1990 and that the historical task was to bring the two halves of the city together. German Wikipedia says the corporate design fixed the appearance of vehicles, stops, information and wayfinding systems and stationery after the merger, including colours, typefaces and type sizes, and is still extended when needed, for instance for the colours of new lines.

The colour came from the street. In the same article Spiekermann recalled that western buses had been beige and the U-Bahn orange-yellow, while in the East the U-Bahn was lemon-cream and the trams orange-cream. The tabloid B.Z. nonetheless called the vehicles “die Großen Gelben”, the big yellow ones, he said, so he persuaded the BVG’s then chief to paint everything sun yellow.

The studio also watched passengers. Eye, in a profile of Spiekermann by William Owen in its Autumn 1995 issue, said MetaDesign preceded its BVG work with a subjective study of how people behave on the underground, sending designers to the stations to look and learn. The magazine described the BVG timetable as plain typography bounded by bars, arrows and circles, each doing a job of signage, over a page-sized circle in a contrasting tint carrying the bus number. It added that the bar MetaDesign liked to bleed off the page appeared on much of its work but not on the BVG identity, because the client forbade it.

Traffic yellow on the vehicles, colour codes on the lines.

A city transit system is read in fragments: a glance at a map on a platform wall, a coloured stripe above a door, a letter on a post at the top of a staircase. The diagram map often becomes the brand itself. It straightens curves, evens out distances and turns a tangle of tunnels into a few clean lines, and people come to picture their city in that shape. Line colours then work as a public language. Once a line is red or green on the map, the same colour appears on platform walls, on direction signs and in the way people give directions, so a change of colour has to be carried through every sign, timetable and leaflet at once. Station names are the vocabulary of that language, and their lettering has to be legible from a moving carriage, in poor light and at a slant, which favours plain letterforms, generous spacing and strong contrast between text and background.

Above ground, the system has to announce itself among shop signs and traffic lights. Many networks rely on a single letter or a simple shape set on a post or a box at each entrance, lit at night and repeated so often that it reads as a symbol before anyone takes in the word. Below ground, some operators bring in artists so that each station has a character of its own, which also helps passengers recognise where they are. The smallest pieces carry the identity too: a ticket, a travel card or a validator has to show the same colours and marks at a scale that fits in a hand.

A house face for signs, a colour for every mode and a slogan from 2015.

The type was built for timetables and signs. German Wikipedia says the BVG’s house typeface is FF Transit, developed for the demands of a transport company, with the usual pictograms and symbols stored as characters in special fonts. It says the face is based on Frutiger, the family by Adrian Frutiger, and was reworked by MetaDesign from the late 1980s for passenger information. The retailer MyFonts credits the family to MetaDesign, says it was released as a FontFont in 1997. TypoJournal reported that the BVG design manual of early 1996 named Transit and the serif Concorde as the house faces, and that revised manuals of 2008 replaced Concorde with Minion; the magazine also logged signs and validators where other typefaces had crept in.

The colours are specified by number. German Wikipedia, citing the BVG’s own corporate design manual of December 2016, lists traffic yellow, RAL 1023, as the basic colour of the BVG logo and of the main surfaces of vehicles, with traffic white for roofs and slate grey, RAL 7015, for the lower body; it adds that buses are now painted in traffic yellow alone. Each mode has its own colour: traffic blue for the U-Bahn, traffic red for the tram, traffic purple for the bus and light blue for the ferry, and each of the nine U-Bahn lines has a code colour of its own, from yellow-green for the U1 to pastel orange for the U9. The brand also has a sound. German Wikipedia says that since 18 May 2022 a BVG-Markenklang has played before announcements, built on the opening of the song “Schöne Maid”.

The voice changed in 2015. A report by the HWR Berlin business school dated 27 January 2020 said the image campaign started that year under the slogan “Weil wir dich lieben”, because we love you, met harsh criticism on social media at the start, and answered it in a quick-witted, provocative and self-ironic tone together with the agency GUD.berlin. It quoted marketing head Frank Büch naming honesty, authenticity and self-irony as part of how the brand is staged. Deutsche Welle wrote on 23 December 2019 about the campaign’s mock bid to be recognised as world cultural heritage, launched with a film of absurd scenes from a changing city.

For a design guide, the BVG shows how a reunified operator can be held together by one vehicle colour, a numbered colour code for every mode and line, and a house face cut for signs, and how a later campaign can speak loosely while the system stays strict. Compare MetaDesign, the studio behind the corporate design, and Deutsche Bahn, whose DB Type was drawn by Spiekermann and Christian Schwartz from 2005. For this guide we use traffic yellow, traffic blue and slate grey with a sans, after the published RAL tones; no product or logo is reproduced.

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