How a national radio service of 1932 became the ABC of today.

The ABC is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the national public broadcaster of Australia. It should not be confused with the American network of the same three letters, which has its own ABC brand guide built around a circle by Paul Rand. The Australian ABC grew out of radio. English Wikipedia says public radio stations were set up in the state capitals from 1924, that a National Broadcasting Service was created in 1928 to take over the stations holding Class A licences, and that a private firm, the Australian Broadcasting Company, founded in 1924, was contracted to supply its programmes.

That arrangement lasted four years. On 1 July 1932, the same article says, the Australian Broadcasting Commission was established under an act of that year to take over the Australian Broadcasting Company and run the National Broadcasting Service. Its structure and programming were broadly modelled on the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the ABC picked up an informal nickname, “Aunty”, in imitation of the one used for the BBC.

Television arrived in 1956. English Wikipedia says the Sydney station ABN-2 was inaugurated on 5 November 1956, with James Dibble reading the station’s opening news bulletin. Relay links between the cities were not in place until the early 1960s, so bulletins were sent to each capital by teleprinter and presented separately in each city. Colour television came to Australia permanently in 1975, the article adds.

Radio kept growing alongside. In 1975 the ABC opened 2JJ, known as Double Jay, a rock station in Sydney that later became the national Triple J network, and a year later it set up a classical music network on FM, first known as ABC-FM and later as ABC Classic FM, broadcasting from Adelaide.

The name changed in 1983. English Wikipedia says the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act of that year renamed the organisation the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 1 July 1983, keeping the same initials. At the same time it was restructured into separate television and radio divisions. New buildings followed: the ABC Ultimo Centre in Sydney in 1991 and the ABC Southbank Centre in Melbourne in 1994. An international television service, ABC Australia, was established in 1993.

A test pattern from an oscilloscope that became a national symbol.

The ABC symbol began as a picture on a screen. English Wikipedia says that in the early years of television the ABC used Lissajous curves as fillers between programmes. A Lissajous curve is the figure traced on an oscilloscope when two oscillating signals are fed to its horizontal and vertical inputs at the same time; the ratio between their frequencies sets the shape of the loop.

A logo followed a staff competition. In July 1963, the same article says, the ABC ran a competition among its staff for a new logo to be used on television, stationery, publications, microphone badges and the corporation’s vehicles. In 1965 an ABC graphics designer, Bill Kennard, submitted a design representing a Lissajous display of the kind produced when a sine wave is applied to the “X” input of an oscilloscope and another, at three times the frequency, to the “Y” input. The letters “ABC” were added and the design was adopted as the official logo.

The first change came nine years later. English Wikipedia says that on 19 October 1974 the curve was given its first facelift: the line was thickened so that colour could be used, and it was drawn with an “over and under” effect, showing where the line crosses itself. The date fell just months before colour television became permanent in Australia in 1975.

For the ABC’s seventieth anniversary on 1 July 2002, the corporation adopted a new logo created by Harcus Design in 2001, according to the same article. It gave the symbol a silver three-dimensional texture but kept the crossover drawing intact, and it was used across the ABC’s outlets. That silver version is no longer in use.

The older drawing came back on air. English Wikipedia says the 1974 logo was revived on air from 2014 and that the ABC then gradually reinstated the classic symbol, with a further change in February 2018, when a new logotype arrived together with a new brand positioning built on the word “Yours”.

A single line, a crossover and three letters.

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 word added to a curve in 2018.

The 2018 positioning was launched in early February that year. Mediaweek reported on 9 February 2018 that the ABC had launched its new brand position under the line “ABC, Yours”. The trade title said the broadcaster had engaged Adam Ferrier, founder and consumer psychologist at the agency Thinkerbell, on the campaign, while the work itself was developed by the ABC’s in-house creative team, ABC MADE, headed by creative director Diana Costantini.

Mediaweek quoted Costantini saying that “Yours” “might be a simple word but it certainly carries a lot of weight”, and that it reminded staff every day that their work was for all Australians.

The change in 2018 was not a new drawing. The curve that went back on the ABC’s logos was the 1974 version, with its thick line and crossover, the one that had been set aside for the silver logo in 2002 and revived on air from 2014. What was new, according to English Wikipedia, was the logotype set beside it and the positioning line that went with it.

The ABC symbol’s shape comes from a piece of technical equipment, the oscilloscope, and from a filler graphic that viewers saw between programmes in the first years of ABC television. It was chosen by staff, drawn by a staff designer and has kept the same basic loop since 1965, while its line weight, colour and surface have changed around it.

The name has stayed stable too. The organisation was the Australian Broadcasting Commission from 1932 and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 1983, and in both cases it was the ABC, so the three letters added to Kennard’s curve in the 1960s never had to change.

For a design guide, the ABC shows how a symbol drawn from an engineer’s instrument can carry a broadcaster for six decades, needing only a heavier line, a crossover and a plain wordmark to stay current. Compare SBS, Australia’s other public broadcaster, or TVNZ across the Tasman. For this guide we use black, teal and silver with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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