From national radio and a Madrid studio to a single public corporation.

RTVE is the Spanish public broadcasting corporation. Spanish Wikipedia describes it as a state-owned trading company that runs the public radio and television service of Spain directly, through two divisions: Televisión Española (TVE) for audiovisual content and Radio Nacional de España (RNE) for radio. It also runs the streaming platform RTVE Play, a training centre called RTVE Instituto and the RTVE Symphony Orchestra and Choir, and it is a member of the European Broadcasting Union, the same article says.

Radio came first. Spanish Wikipedia dates the origins of the present corporation to the founding of Radio Nacional de España in 1937. Television followed two decades later. Spanish Wikipedia says TVE began regular broadcasting on 28 October 1956, when its first channel went on air, and that until the arrival of videotape around 1963 almost everything was made in the cramped studios on the Paseo de La Habana in Madrid. In 1964 the larger studios at Prado del Rey opened, along with studios for TVE in the Canary Islands, the article says.

Colour arrived in stages. TVE began broadcasting in the PAL system in 1969, Spanish Wikipedia says, though a shortage of colour cameras and video recorders held back regular colour production until 1973. The first channel, known today as La 1, has been on the air since that first night in 1956.

The organisation around the channels changed name and form several times. Spanish Wikipedia sets out the stages: an autonomous body called Organismo Autónomo Radio Televisión Española from 1977, the Ente Público RTVE from 1980, and from 2007 the present Corporación RTVE, created when the Ente was refounded. TVE and RNE, which had been separate companies within the Ente, became the two divisions of the new corporation. The Spanish site FormulaTV wrote in June 2008 that the corporation had been born in January 2007.

That change of structure is the starting point for the identity story that follows. A single corporation now sat above television, radio and the web, and its visual identity still reflected the older arrangement, with different symbols for different companies.

From joined letters drawn in the 1960s to a mark built on light.

The older marks had a long life. Spanish Wikipedia says the earlier RTVE logo was made of the letters “rtve” joined together, designed by Emilio Sáenz around the 1960s and redesigned in 1991 by José Giménez de Pueblo. The TVE logo dates from the same decade, and the article on Televisión Española says it stayed almost unchanged until 1991, when the angles at the ends of the “T” and “E” were altered and the letters were made heavier.

Colour blocks came next. In 1992, the TVE article says, the logo was placed inside a blue square with a red rectangle on its left and a green one on its right, rectangles that were partly removed in 1998. In spring 1999 the two main channels gained their own marks: a blue square with a “1” in the centre for La 1 and a green square with a larger “2” for La 2. On 30 September 2007 both marks turned white, and La 2 dropped its green for a run of seasonal tones, the article says. The RNE logo, Spanish Wikipedia adds, dated from the 1980s, so the symbols of the corporation did not form a single family.

The new identity was unveiled in the spring of 2008. FormulaTV reported on 7 June 2008 that the corporation would bring a new visual and brand identity to all its channels and platforms the following season. It was presented in Valladolid at RTVE’s second convention of directors, the report said, and it had been created by the brand consultancy SUMMA. According to FormulaTV, RTVE would now have a single parent image from which those of all its companies derived, with logos and graphics consistent across every company. The symbols it replaced had roots, in various forms, going back about two decades, the report said.

Light was the central idea. FormulaTV said the identity was based on light breaking into all the colours of the spectrum, and quoted the broadcaster describing light as a symbol of renewal, energy and movement. Gradients of orange marked RTVE and its website RTVE.ES, blue marked TVE and red marked RNE. The typeface was soft and rounded, redesigned specifically for RTVE, and it gave prominence to the letter “e”, the vowel all the brands share.

The switch came at the end of the summer. Spanish Wikipedia says the new unified logo came into force on 31 August 2008, set in lowercase in a flat rounded type with the “e” emphasised.

A lowercase name, a long “e” and a colour for each service.

Public broadcasters often keep their initials while the shape around them changes. In Belgium, Télépro reported on 23 June 2015 that a symbol drawn by the designer Michel Olyff in 1967 was shared by the French-language RTB and the Dutch-language BRT. When the RTB became the RTBF in December 1977, French Wikipedia says, the letters “RTB” and a large “F” were added to that same emblem, so the new name was set into the old mark rather than replacing it. La Libre Belgique reported on 10 June 2005 that the RTBF had then dropped the emblem for a blue corporate logo by Publicis, with black in the letter “F”.

The letters can also become the name. Danish Wikipedia dates the first DR logo to 1964, while the broadcaster was still called Danmarks Radio, and records the formal change of name to DR in 1996. When reading a broadcaster’s identity, look at which letters stay fixed through each rename, which symbol or shape is added to them or taken away, and whether the channel names are built from the parent’s initials.

A parent brand, a common surname and a colour code.

The 2008 system was organised as a family tree. FormulaTV reported that RTVE was set up as the parent brand, with TVE, RNE, RTVE.ES and the products and channels of each company as extensions that shared a common visual and conceptual style. The letter “e”, present in every name, was meant to work as their common surname and to give the whole group a recognisable personality, the report said.

Colour did the sorting. Spanish Wikipedia lists the tones used once the unified logo came in: orange for RTVE, blue for La 1, aquamarine for La 2, a reddish orange for the news channel 24 horas, an orange-yellow for Teledeporte, pink for the children’s channel Clan and a dark vermilion red for RNE. The RTVE article adds that TVE uses blue in different shades as its main colour, with pink, orange and red on some of the specialist channels.

The idea behind the system was stated plainly in 2008. FormulaTV quoted the corporation saying that RTVE, TVE, RNE and RTVE.ES needed to be identified better as a group, a corporation pooling its efforts and means. One parent image with many coloured extensions was the answer the corporation gave, and the same lowercase “e” has carried across television, radio and the web since then.

The older marks are still part of the record. The joined “rtve” of Emilio Sáenz and its 1991 redraw by José Giménez de Pueblo, and TVE’s blue square with its red and green rectangles, came before the move to light and gradients in 2008.

For a design guide, RTVE shows how a broadcaster with separate television, radio and web companies can tie them together with one shared letter and a strict colour per service, while letting each channel keep its own tone. Compare Rai, the Italian public broadcaster that also gives each channel its own colour, or ZDF, the German public broadcaster founded in Mainz in 1963. For this guide we use orange, blue, aquamarine and vermilion with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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