New look: 3sat

3sat is a public television channel for the German-speaking countries. This advertising-free channel was founded in 1984 as a collaboration between the public broadcasters ZDF in Germany, ORF in Austria and SRG in Switzerland. Its schedule complements the domestic public channels in the German countries with programmes on culture and science.

Earlier this year, on April 16, 3sat launched a new on-air-look, created by the German motion design agency Velvet Mediendesign. The new look is inspired by the channel's slogan, Anders Fernsehen, which is play on words, and can mean both "Different television" and "Watch television differently".

The concept behind the new ID spots is called "The Magic of 3", and divides the screen into three parts that slide vertically to alter the image and the story. A compilation of the new idents can be seen below:



Even though 3sat doesn't broadcast in HD yet, the idents are produced in widescreen HD fomat in anticipation of a future launch. The music was produced by Largoland Musicproduction in Berlin.

Trailers and other on-screen presentation presentation uses the vertical slide effect seen in the IDs. 3sat's signature typeface is Gill Sans Bold Condensed, which is used in all on-air graphics and in most programmes originally produced for the channel. 3sat has a long relation with this this typeface, having used it for at least twenty years.

The previous on-air design was introduced on July 1, 2003, along with channel's current logo. It launched red as 3sat's signature colour, which dominates most on-screen graphics. It also included a large number of ID spots where people are filmed with "dolly zoom" effect, also known as the "Vertigo effect". The 2003 IDs were created by a production company from Frankfurt called Filmstyler, while the logo was developed in-house at ZDF. After its introduction, this graphics package has only gone through minor changes, the most significant being the switch to widescreen when the IDs were cropped.
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