Mystery solved This man is behind the legendary kebab logo

Everyone knows the kebab wrapper. But who actually designed it? An ARD podcast has finally solved the mystery.

Anyone who has ever eaten a kebab will have seen the man with the knife in front of the meat skewer on the paper containing the bread bag. But hardly anyone knows the story behind the legendary design.

The ARD podcast "Obsessed: Döner Papers" has now solved the mystery. Mehmet Unay is behind the paper. At the time, he worked as a graphic designer for a Turkish travel company in Germany. He also took on small commissions from the Turkish community. Today he is retired.

For little money and without knowing how famous his illustration would become, Unay created the kebab logo at the end of the 1980s. "It wasn't our intention to make a famous logo. The job was a stopgap," he says.

The logo was finished within an hour

But the design was not entirely his own. Because the budget was so small, the effort needed to be kept to a minimum. So the graphic designer used a template from a catalog with illustrations that were common in the pre-Google age.

He found a chef with a hat and rolled roast. He put a long knife in his hand and added a kebab skewer. After an hour, he was done, and someone else later added the Döner Kebab logo on top.

Although the kebab logo became so successful and established itself throughout Germany, Mehmet Unay never officially acknowledged his work. For him, the image was the result of the work of several people.

It took three years of research to narrow down the date of creation to between 1984 and 1991. The ARD team around podcast host Aylin Doğan discovered a graphic template from the 1980s that served as a model for the logo.

In the end, the person behind it could also be identified; contact was made via Mehmet Unay's son, who is also a graphic designer today.