Eye Magazine

Deutschland 86 (2018)

Saskia Marka’s titles for this Cold War thriller series (also Deutschland 83 and 89) has a ‘new wave’ flair that evokes the era in tandem with the title song, the 1983 hit ‘Major Tom (Coming Home)’ by German synthpop musician Peter Schilling.

For the second season, where the action spanned southern Africa as well as East and West Germany, the titles feature leading characters Martin (Jonas Nay, top left), Rose (Florence Kasumba, top right) and Annett (Sonja Gerhardt, above left) as well as signifiers to a time when East German home and work life was increasingly out of step with much of the rest of the world. …

Marka explains her approach to Deutschland’s titles: ‘The country and also the characters are torn apart. That is why I chose torn paper collages as a central form of expression. Their look evolves throughout the three seasons.’

Babylon Berlin series 4 (2022)

To date, Saskia Marka has worked on all four series of Babylon Berlin (2017-2022), a fictional TV series set in the city and which follows its two leads, played by Volker Bruch and Liv Lisa Fries, during the last few years of the Weimar Republic. Series four begins at the end of 1930.

The construction of the opening titles has remained unchanged throughout.

Marka explains: ‘The directors wanted to go with a different colour each time and update the imagery in the background. The concept is to feature the two main characters, but all other cast and shots in the sequence are symbolic hints about the content of the show.

As time moves from the 1920s to the 30s, the overall feel of the seasons has changed according to the history of those times. The music has also remained the same.’

The Queen’s Gambit (2020)

The titles for TV drama series The Queen’s Gambit have an unclichéd mix of elegance and grain that stands out from other Netflix hits. ‘The graininess was one of the first things in terms of a look that I knew I wanted to try for this sequence,’ says Marka. ‘It feels very modern, yet timeless and you can relate to it as “old” as well. I like it when visual elements can be interpreted into different directions, so that the audience can make up their own mind.’ Marka used clips first made in Processing, which were smaller in resolution than the required 4K. However, the type formed a challenge. ‘I wanted to extend the moving black and white images in the background until the last frame, but they were so high in contrast that the credits were not legible. I put all credits on black bars as the only solution to my problem. But then you couldn’t see the switch from credit to credit. So I inverted every second credit, which made sense with the black and white look.

It looks now like it was always the concept, but it was created from a necessity.’

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

First published in Eye no. 104 vol. 26, 2023

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues.