A radio trial of 1925, a television start in 1951 and three names in seventy years.

DR is the Danish public broadcaster, the organisation behind the television channels DR1 and DR2, a set of national radio channels and the website dr.dk. Danish Wikipedia says it began on 1 April 1925 as a trial scheme called Radioordningen, sending one radio programme from studios at the main telegraph station in Købmagergade in Copenhagen. After the trial year the service was made permanent under the name Statsradiofonien, the article says, under a radio law of 13 March 1926.

The early years were about reach and rooms. Danish Wikipedia says Statsradiofonien became nationwide in 1927 with the opening of the Kalundborg transmitting station, and that it moved into rented rooms at Axelborg in Copenhagen in 1928. In 1941 it moved again, into the newly built Radiohuset on Rosenørns Allé in Frederiksberg, though the concert hall in the building was only opened in 1945, after the occupation, according to the same article.

Television came next. Danish Wikipedia says office rooms in Radiohuset were fitted out as a trial television studio in 1949, that the radio channel P2 began on 1 October 1951, and that the first official television broadcasts of Statsradiofonien followed the next day. Colour arrived in 1967, the article adds, and stereo sound in 1988. Television activity moved out of Radiohuset in 1970 to TV-Byen, a site at Gyngemosen in Gladsaxe that had been taken into use from 1963.

The names changed with the law. Danish Wikipedia says Statsradiofonien became Danmarks Radio with effect from 1 November 1959, following a radio law of 3 June 1959 that for the first time set the broadcaster up as an independent public institution. In 1996 Danmarks Radio was renamed DR, the same article says, and the website dr.dk opened that year. The second television channel, DR2, opened in 1996 as well, first by satellite and from a small number of ground transmitters.

Two letters had in fact been in use long before the 1996 rename. Danish and English Wikipedia both date the first DR logo to 1964, in use until 29 August 1996, so the initials served as a mark for more than three decades before they became the formal name. The sections below follow those two letters through five logos and one large move.

Five logos between 1964 and 2013, and a rebrand tied to a move.

The logo history is short to list and long in time. English Wikipedia gives five DR logos: the first from 1964 to 29 August 1996, the second from 30 August 1996 to 31 May 2005, the third from 1 June 2005 to 31 August 2009, the fourth from 1 September 2009 to 31 January 2013, and the fifth, the current one, from 1 February 2013. Danish Wikipedia gives the same dates. Each of them is built on the two letters D and R.

The second logo arrived with the new name. The change of 30 August 1996 came in the year that Danmarks Radio became DR and dr.dk went online, so the mark and the name changed together. From then on the two letters were the name as well as the logo, and they were used for DR TV, DR Radio and the new online service alike, according to a Danish radio history site cited by Danish Wikipedia.

The third logo belongs to the move to a new home. English Wikipedia says DR was rebranded with a new logo designed by the Copenhagen agency Front Nordic as part of its relocation to DR Byen. Front Nordic says on its own site that the organisation was rebranded in a value-based identity process timed to coincide with the move of its headquarters to Amager in Copenhagen in 2006. The logo dates in Wikipedia put the switch on 1 June 2005, ahead of the move itself.

The current logo is the plainest of the five. English Wikipedia describes the 2013 mark as the letters “DR” in a white sans-serif on a black background, introduced at the same time as a new line-up of television channels. The youth channel DR3 replaced DR HD, the children’s channel DR Ultra replaced DR Update, and DR2 was reworked as a channel for news and society, the article says.

The channel marks follow the parent. English Wikipedia’s lists for DR1 and DR2 show their previous logos in use from 1 September 2009 to 31 January 2013 and the current ones from 1 February 2013, the same dates as the DR mark. The result is a family in which the broadcaster’s initials lead and the channel number follows.

Initials kept through every rename, with the shape around them changing.

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 broadcasting town on Amager and a concert hall in blue.

The move that the 2005 logo was timed for brought DR’s scattered sites together. Danish Wikipedia says the decision to gather all of DR’s activities at one address was taken in 1999, that the topping-out ceremony was held in 2004, and that DR Byen was taken into use in 2006. English Wikipedia says DR moved all of its activities from Radiohuset in Frederiksberg and TV-Byen in Søborg to the new complex in the Ørestad area of Copenhagen during 2006 and 2007. Radio had been sent from Radiohuset until then, Danish Wikipedia adds.

A prominent part of DR Byen is its concert hall. Fabric Architecture reported on 1 May 2012, in a piece by Mason Riddle, that the DR Koncerthuset opened in January 2009 to a design by the French architect Jean Nouvel, and that it is the home of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra. The building is wrapped in a translucent cobalt blue textile skin, a fabric by Serge Ferrari named Ice Blue, stretched over steel beams, tension cables and a glass façade, the magazine said.

The blue skin works as a screen. According to Fabric Architecture, by day the outlines of the halls and studios inside, and people moving between levels, can be seen through it, and by night the façade carries projected video montages. The magazine quoted Nouvel saying that the façades are filters that let people see the city, the canal and the buildings nearby, and that at night they become screens for projecting images. Nouvel first thought of the blue screen as a kind of “magic lantern” that would draw other buildings around it, the piece said.

That gives DR two quite different public faces. On screen the identity is reduced to two letters, white on black, with the channel numbers set beside them. On the ground in Ørestad it is a blue box that shows moving images on its outside walls at night. Both carry the same short name that has stood for the broadcaster since 1996.

The older houses keep the earlier names in view. Radiohuset in Frederiksberg, where the broadcaster was based from 1941 to 1970 according to Danish Wikipedia, and TV-Byen in Gladsaxe, its base until 2006, date from the years of Statsradiofonien and Danmarks Radio, before the initials became the name.

For a design guide, DR shows how a public broadcaster can use the same two initials as a mark for decades, make them the formal name, and then strip the logo back to white letters on black while its building does the colourful work. Compare the Norwegian broadcaster in the NRK brand guidelines and the Swedish one in the SVT brand guidelines. For this guide we use studio black, paper white, a concert-hall blue and a signal red with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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