Tatort – “Verbrannt”

Tatort (“crime scene”) is a German language police crime series. It has been continuously on the air since 1970, making it the longest-running TV-drama of Germany. Tatort is jointly produced by the ARD, a joint organisation of Germany’s regional public-service broadcasters, the Austrian ORF and the Swiss SRF.

[…] every regional station contributes a number of episodes to a common pool. Therefore, the series is a collection of different police stories where different police teams each solve crimes in their respective city. Uniqueness in architecture, customs and dialects of the cities is therefore a distinctive part of the series and often the city, not the police force is the real main character of an episode. — Wikipedia

Due to this anthological concept, not only the narrative, the actors and the scenes of each episode vary, but also the design vocabulary and the titles of each subseries — with one exception: the iconic opening sequence, created by German graphic designer Kristina Böttrich-Merdjanowa in 1969. It concludes with a zoom into the logo of the series: “tatort” in custom-drawn lowercase letters loosely based on Futura Bold, with the ‘o’ centered in a crosshair.

This common sequence is followed by individual opening credits left to the discretion of each production team. The recent episode #957, Verbrannt, produced by the Hamburg-based NDR, made consistent and sober use of Interstate Bold.