NIR, BRT, BRTN and VRT, and two buildings in Brussels.

VRT is the short name of the Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie, the public broadcaster for radio and television in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of Belgium. Dutch Wikipedia describes it as a public-law limited company set up by the Flemish government. Its present name is one of several it has carried.

The line begins with the NIR, the national radio institute, which Dutch Wikipedia says was responsible for public radio from 1930 and for television from 1953, until 1960. From 1960 the Dutch-language broadcaster was called BRT, Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep. On 27 March 1991 the name changed to BRTN, adding a reference to Dutch-language broadcasting, because the BRT broadcast only in Dutch while the French-speaking community had its own public broadcaster, the RTBF.

The VRT name followed a change of legal form. Dutch Wikipedia says BRTN became a public-law limited company on 16 April 1997, and that the name was changed to VRT on 1 January 1998. The letters themselves were later re-read: since 6 October 2009, the same article says, VRT has stood for Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie, where before it stood for Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep, a change that followed new media legislation.

Television channels grew alongside the names. English Wikipedia says the second channel, BRT TV2, was launched on 26 April 1977, and that the main channel now called VRT 1 was known as Eén before that.

The broadcaster has had two main homes in Brussels. Dutch Wikipedia says it was housed from 1938 to 1974 in the Flagey building in Ixelles, designed by the architect Joseph Diongre. In 1974 it moved to the Auguste Reyerslaan in Schaerbeek, into a new building put up together with the French-language RTB. Plans for a new VRT building on the same site were announced in early 2016.

A shared symbol from 1967, dropped in Flanders in the 1990s and recalled later.

For years, Belgian public broadcasting shared one sign. Telepro, the Belgian television magazine, reported on 23 June 2015 that a new logo appeared in 1967, still common to the RTB and the BRT, in which a curled form became the symbol of public broadcasting in Belgium. Its designer was Michel Olyff, a graphic designer trained at La Cambre in Brussels, according to the same article by Pierre Bertinchamps.

People gave the sign many names. Telepro listed “the shell”, “the eye that hears”, “the ear that sees” and the horn of plenty, alongside the plain name, the ear. Olyff himself rejected that reading. The magazine quoted him in 1989 saying the aim was to express the idea of broadcasting: all the equipment of the period involved rotation, hence a circle turning on itself and widening like waves. The drawing, he said, did not show an ear at all.

Dutch Wikipedia dates the BRT version of this logo from 1968 to 1979, English Wikipedia from 1967 to 1979. Both list a further BRT logo from 1979 to 1991, a BRTN logo from 1991 to 1998 and a VRT logo from 1998 to 2002. Telepro said that Flanders was the side that dropped the historic symbol earliest, in the 1990s, and that by 2015 only the German-speaking broadcaster BRF still used it in its station logos before it too gave it up that June.

The later VRT logos are dated closely in Wikipedia. Dutch Wikipedia says one VRT logo was used from 7 January 2002 to 21 June 2017, the next from 22 June 2017 to 28 August 2022, and the current one from 29 August 2022. English Wikipedia adds an interim variant in bright green and black from July 2021.

The curl returned in a new form. The design firm Pentagram says on its project page that it designed a brand identity for VRT, its longstanding client, in which the new wordmark is held in a droplet shape that refers to the ear form found in VRT’s logos between 1960 and 1991. Pentagram says the identity had to raise the impact and ease of use of VRT’s radio and television brands in digital spaces and to take in the video player VRT NU and the innovation hub VRT Start-Up, and that it worked with the strategy agency The Upside.

A curl, a droplet and three letters.

A broadcaster’s identity often lives as much in its channel names as in its mark. M+AD Daily reported on 30 September 2016 that TVNZ would rename TV ONE as TVNZ 1 and TV2 as TVNZ 2 from 2 October that year, in a rebrand produced by its in-house Blacksand creative team, with new channel idents carrying original music and a special TVNZ font. TVNZ’s marketing head, Sarah Finnie, told the site the aim was for the channels to “look and feel like one family of content brands”.

Initials can also carry a long lineage of older names. The Honolulu Advertiser reported on 4 March 2007 that the station behind KBS made its first broadcast as JODK in Seoul on 16 February 1927, took the call sign HL in 1947 and was renamed in 1973. When reading a broadcaster’s identity, look at which letters lead each channel name, which earlier names they replaced, and what the idents between programmes are asked to carry.

Names that follow the law, and a symbol that comes back.

VRT’s identity story has two strands that run at different speeds. The names change when the legal shape changes: NIR to BRT in 1960, BRT to BRTN in 1991, BRTN to VRT in 1998 after the move to a public-law company, and a new reading of the same three letters in 2009 after new media legislation. Each step is recorded in Dutch Wikipedia with a date.

The symbol moves more slowly. Olyff’s curl of 1967 belonged to Belgian public broadcasting as a whole, not to one language community, and Telepro described it in 2015 as part of the collective memory of Belgians. Flanders let it go in the 1990s, according to the magazine, and the logos that followed in Wikipedia’s lists are lettered marks for BRTN and then VRT.

Pentagram’s droplet is a reference rather than a revival. The firm says the shape that holds the new wordmark recalls the ear form of the logos used between 1960 and 1991, and that the geometric shape forms the basis of a wider design language. It also says the system was built across VRT’s brand architecture so that sub-brands and the mother brand follow one logic, with the news brand VRT NWS and the player VRT NU among the applications it shows.

Olyff’s own words give the old curl a different meaning. In the 1989 quote reported by Telepro, the circle that turns and widens stands for waves going out, the act of broadcasting, rather than for an organ that listens. The ear reading stuck with the public all the same, and it is the word Pentagram uses for the form today.

The buildings carry the history too. The Flagey building of 1938 and the shared Reyers site of 1974 are the two addresses the BRT and VRT names grew up in, and Dutch Wikipedia records that the Reyers site was chosen again for a new building announced in 2016.

For a design guide, VRT shows how a broadcaster can change its name several times in step with the law, let a shared national symbol go, and later draw on its shape inside a new wordmark system. Compare the Dutch public broadcaster in the NOS brand guidelines and the British one in the BBC brand guidelines. For this guide we use deep green, studio black and a lime accent with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep VRT’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.