An annual road race and civic sports festival in Munich. The identity draws on Otl Aicher's grid-based pictogram language: every figure is constructed on a 10×10 square grid; every stroke runs only at 0°, 45° or 90°. The grid constraint is the whole system. A figure that breaks it stops being part of the family.
The running figure is constructed on the grid, then extracted and set alongside a lightweight lowercase wordmark. The colour bands below anchor every application to the event palette.
Sky ground
Dark ground
Figure only
Draw a figure on the grid. Every node snaps to a grid intersection. Every stroke runs at 0°, 45° or 90°. Toggle a stroke: watch it snap to the nearest valid angle or vanish.
Show invalid stroke
Show grid overlay
Any stroke that does not align to 0°, 45° or 90° breaks the system. No exceptions. A curve breaks it. A diagonal at 30° breaks it.
Sky blue is the primary ground. The four band colours are fixed; their order and proportion are fixed. No additional colours are permitted. The white is natural paper; it is never fluorescent or warm grey.
IBM Plex Sans Light (300 weight) as a Univers-equivalent: geometric, humanist, no ornament. Always lowercase for the wordmark; always tracked loosely. Body text at 300 weight, never bold. Mono for data and reference numbers only.
Display — 300 weight, lowercase, tracked .18em
laufen
Body — 300 weight, mixed case, 16/26
Registration closes on 1 September. Starting time is 09:00. Finishers collect their medal at the Marienplatz.
Data (IBM Plex Mono)
Bib 4017
Category: Open Men
Start wave: B · 09:15
The horizontal colour band locks every piece to the event. It appears at the base of posters and at the foot of all race communications. The figure appears top-left on landscape formats; centred on square.
Direct and civic. No celebration, no urgency. The city organises; the runner decides. The tone is informational, never promotional.
The city runs. You choose the distance.
Tagline. Lowercase, no period. Used on all open-registration materials.
Any stroke at an angle other than 0°, 45° or 90° breaks the system. The figure ceases to be a pictogram; it becomes a drawing. Drawings cannot be systematically reproduced at all sizes and media.
Adding a third colour outside the five-colour palette breaks the band lock. The bands are not decorative; they are a fixed system element. A sixth colour reads as a different event.
A serif typeface or any condensed-without-tracking wordmark breaks the lightweight-grid character. The grid lives in the letterforms: Plex Sans Light at generous tracking is not interchangeable with Helvetica Bold set tight.
A curved stroke in the pictogram—an elbow or a bent knee drawn as an arc—cannot be reproduced consistently at 12mm (bib) and 2m (banner). The 45° constraint is a manufacturing rule as much as an aesthetic one.