Ankommen is a free app developed by Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF), designed especially for refugees and newcomers arriving in Germany.
It provides essential information about asylum procedures, access to work and training, living in Germany and it includes a free self-learning German language course to help users start learning the language.
There is also a website which accompanies the app and gives similar information. The front page is used to advertise the app and introduce the concept.
The colours which are used in their logo, favicon and app-icon can be found throughout all pages of the website and app. They use each colour to represent one topic. For example the topic „Living in Germany“ is turquoise, „Asylum, Apprenticeship, Job“ is yellow and so on. Through this method they are keeping a structure which is understandable for everyone. Furthermore, the logo is more recognizable as the same colours are used repeatedly and the logo acts as both favicon and app-icon as well.
They are using a simple and easy to read font type, it could be „source sans pro“ (suggested by ChatGPT). The accessible and clean font type suits the purpose of the app as a governmental service.
Like many apps or services developed by a government body, „Ankommen“ does not have the most outstanding design and branding strategies from my point of view. On the one hand both the website and the app are not really interactive, fun to use or look at. But on the other hand, they keep it simple and structured which is the most important when creating a service which is mostly used by people who are struggling to understand the language. This is despite the fact that the articles are extremely long in my opinion, which counteracts the accessibility of the simple design choices.
Through this short analysis I learned how you can use colours to create structure and that easy to read sans fonts suits a website provided by a government body.
References:
Arrival (n.a.). Arrival. A guide for your first weeks in Germany. Available at: https://ankommenapp.de/APP/EN/Startseite/startseite-node.html (accessed 10.02.26)