A national broadcaster of 1930, split by language in 1960 and renamed in 1977.

RTBF is the public broadcaster of French-speaking Belgium, the organisation behind the television channels La Une, Tipik and La Trois, radio stations such as La Première, Classic 21 and Vivacité, and the platform Auvio. Its roots go back to the INR, the national broadcasting institute. French Wikipedia gives 18 June 1930 as the date the INR was created, serving the whole country in French and Dutch.

The split came in 1960. French Wikipedia says the law of 8 August 1960 created the Radio-télévision belge, the RTB, after thirty years of the INR, with a Dutch-language counterpart, the BRT, alongside it. In the years that followed, according to the same article, television became independent of radio, with its own staff and premises. Colour television came in 1971, and regional production centres were set up in Liège and Charleroi in 1976 and in Brussels in 1979.

The present name followed the reform of the Belgian state. French Wikipedia says that, after Belgium created linguistic communities in the 1970s, a decree of the cultural council of the French Community turned the RTB into the Radio-Télévision belge de la Communauté française, the RTBF, on 12 December 1977. The German-speaking Community set up its own broadcaster, the BRF, at the same time. The RTBF and the BRF kept the B for Belgium, the article notes, while the Flemish BRT became the VRT in 1998.

The RTB had also started a second television channel in 1977, RTBis, according to French Wikipedia. Later channels arrived under the RTBF name: La Trois was launched officially on 30 November 2007, the article says, as part of the launch of the RTBF’s digital terrestrial package, with its content and on-air look the same as those of RTBF Sat and only the channel logo changed.

The broadcaster is based on the Boulevard Reyers in Schaerbeek, in the Brussels region, beside the Reyers tower that carries relay equipment for both the RTBF and the VRT, French Wikipedia says. It also lists regional production centres in Charleroi, Liège, Mons, Namur and Libramont. The sections below follow the marks the broadcaster has used since the 1960s, starting with a symbol it shared with Flanders.

A shared symbol of 1967, an F in 1977 and a lowercase logo in 2005.

The first mark was not RTBF’s alone. Télépro reported on 23 June 2015, in a piece by Pierre Bertinchamps, that the logo which appeared in 1967 was common to the RTB and the BRT, and that it became the symbol of public broadcasting in Belgium. Its designer was Michel Olyff, a graphic designer and graduate of La Cambre, the magazine said. The public called it “the ear”, and also the shell, the eye that hears, the ear that sees and the horn of plenty.

Olyff saw it differently. Télépro quoted him in 1989 saying that the aim was to express the idea of broadcasting: the equipment of the time involved rotating movements, hence a circle turning on itself and widening like waves, and the drawing did not show an ear at all. French Wikipedia adds, citing a 1997 interview, that Olyff preferred the word emblem to logo and described the shape as the horn of a phonograph, a symbol of the transmitter rather than the receiver.

The emblem changed with the name. French Wikipedia says that in December 1977 the letters “RTB” and a large “F” were added to it, still under Olyff’s supervision, to mark the change from RTB to RTBF. In October 1982 it was reworked a second time, by Jean Binon, to be shown in the three primary colours, the same article says.

A redesign of 1994 was more contested. Télépro reported that the RTBF asked the French agency Gédéon to rework its graphic image that year, adding a square frame around an updated version of the symbol, and that Olyff objected. French Wikipedia describes the changes as a frame, blue in place of black, a ring in place of the white disc and a break in the lower curve. The two sides reached an agreement, Télépro said, and the original form returned to RTBF screens a few months later. French Wikipedia lists the version reworked by Olyff as in use from 1 September 1997.

Flanders had already moved on. Télépro said it was the Flemish side that first dropped the historic logo, in the 1990s, and that the BRF dropped it in June 2015, when it changed its look from green to blue. With that change, the magazine said, the shared symbol left Belgian screens.

Initials kept, an emblem retired and a dot-be added.

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.

Lowercase letters, a domain name and a hyphen.

The RTBF let the emblem go in 2005. La Libre Belgique reported on 10 June 2005 that the broadcaster had officially raised a new corporate emblem designed by the agency Publicis, after a version had appeared in an annual guide in mid-April. The new mark had dropped the shell or ear, the trademark of Michel Olyff, the paper said, and was dressed entirely in blue, with a second colour, black, in the letter “F” to point to the French Community. French Wikipedia dates the switch to 9 June 2005 and describes the logo as the letters “rtbf” in lowercase.

The new emblem was meant to sit above the channel marks rather than replace them. La Libre Belgique said it capped a renewal of the visual identities of the television channels and radio stations, which kept their own signatures, and that it was meant to act as the link between them. Télépro later described the lowercase letters as standing for flexibility, simplicity and openness.

The next step was a domain name. La Libre Belgique reported on 12 January 2010, citing the Belga agency, that the RTBF was adopting a new generic logo for all its brands, RTBF.BE, announced that day to staff by its administrator-general, Jean-Paul Philippot, and due on its channels from the next day. The broadcaster linked the change to its multimedia plans, the paper said. French Wikipedia says a blue circle holding the .be domain was added to the letters, and lists the rtbf.be logo as in use from 13 January 2010 to 8 December 2025.

A further change puts the parent name on every channel. The RTBF said in its own news article of 8 December 2025 that all the logos of its channels now include the RTBF brand, on its website, its social networks and on air, with a new signature, “Découvrir, ensemble”. The company says a hyphen carries the idea visually, a digital hyphen meant to recall a swipe. French Wikipedia lists the current channel marks as RTBF La Une, RTBF Tipik and RTBF La Trois, with radio names built the same way.

For a design guide, RTBF shows how a broadcaster can keep the same four initials through a change of name, retire a shared symbol that the public read differently from its designer, and then fold every channel into the parent name. Compare its Flemish counterpart in the VRT brand guidelines and the Norwegian broadcaster in the NRK brand guidelines. For this guide we use Reyers blue, sky blue, paper white and letter black with an open sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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