The launch of the brand identity for TUI AG heralded a complete change of direction for the company, formerly known as Preussag. In just a few years, TUI managed to establish itself as Europe's leading tourism operator, serving destinations at home and abroad. This was no easy achievement in a competitive industry where keen pricing and good service make or break success.

From the very start Dalton Maag was invited to contribute typographic insight to this radical rebrand, lead by Interbrand's Cologne office. The designers at Interbrand understood that an original font design could provide the foundation for the entire identity. The TUI symbol was created first, to establish the mood and the look and feel. It symbolizes the smile that a holidaymaker carries home with them when having travelled with TUI. The symbol informed some of the design details in the font, for example, the stroke terminals are soft rather than square cut. At the same time Interbrand's design team established a bright colour palette for TUI using light primary colours that beautifully complemented the strong red of the logo.

The font design had to fulfill three functions: to have a friendly, warm and inviting expression, to harmonize with and support the other design elements, and to be highly legible when used in holiday brochures or smallprint. The Dalton Maag team developed a number of design concepts that answered this brief, with one chosen design being refined in cooperation with Interbrand's designers to expand it to a full character set. To enable versatility of the typographic element, the font family consists of four weights plus matching italics. Recently we were asked to create a Cyrillic character set to add to the font and help TUI communicate clearly in the Russian market.

Besides the core set of text fonts, we created logo and symbol fonts for TUI. The symbol fonts contain directional arrows, stars and other dingbats. By placing individual company logos into a font, and the dingbats, the client has the opportunity to easily utilize these in office environments without loss of quality when displayed on any output device. The fonts are also of benefit to the client's IT system as they can be installed to facilitate the printing of icons and symbols on bills, or they can easily be assembled in holiday catalogues.

Since the launch of the new identity in 2001 TUI has managed to establish market dominance. This was achieved in no small part through the coherent brand appearance, applied with great discipline in all countries where TUI has a presence.