From the break-up of the ORTF to a single public television company.

France Télévisions is the French public television group behind France 2, France 3, France 4, France 5, the news channel franceinfo and the streaming platform france.tv. Its roots lie in the break-up of the national broadcaster, the ORTF. French Wikipedia says the ORTF was split into separate companies on 31 December 1974, and that three national television companies were created on 6 January 1975: TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3. Antenne 2 and FR3 are the two channels from which the present group grew.

The two stayed apart in law for years. French Wikipedia says a law of 2 August 1989 gave Antenne 2 and FR3 a common president while keeping them legally separate, so that their programmes could be planned side by side. The names changed three years later. On 7 September 1992, the same article says, Antenne 2 became France 2 and FR3 became France 3, and the pair were grouped under a new name, France Télévision, written without a final “s” and without its own legal existence.

The legal structure followed in two steps. French Wikipedia says the law of 1 August 2000 created the holding company France Télévisions, this time with an “s”, bringing together France 2, France 3 and La Cinquième, the educational channel that would soon be renamed France 5. Then, on 4 January 2010, following a law of 5 March 2009, the holding and the companies beneath it were merged into a single company, a national programme company in French law. The French State owns France Télévisions through its shareholding agency, the APE, the article says.

The group also gained a single home in that period. French Wikipedia says the staff of the group, until then spread across many sites in Paris, moved in 1998 into a new headquarters on the banks of the Seine in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The building was designed by the architect Jean-Paul Viguier and built between 1995 and 1998, according to the same article. France 2, France 3, France 4, France 5 and franceinfo all work from it today.

Over those three decades the family widened. French Wikipedia lists France 4, the overseas network now called La 1re, and franceinfo, whose name and logo were unveiled on 11 July 2016, among the services the group runs. Each new channel had to fit into a visual system that began with only two numbers and two colours, which is the thread followed in the sections below.

From a red 2 and a blue 3 to trapezoids, screens and a dot.

A shared look came with the 1992 names. French Wikipedia says the agency Gédéon designed close-matched logos to stress that the two channels belonged together: a red “2” and a blue “3”, each with the word “France” written inside the numeral. The common group logo set the two figures together, framing the group name between them. Red for France 2 and blue for France 3 have stayed with the channels ever since.

The holding company of 2000 needed a new mark. French Wikipedia says France Télévisions launched a tender for a new on-air package in 2001, and that Gédéon won it with a single-colour logo of four moving screens above the group name. The designers took the BBC blocks as a starting point and turned the three squares of the British mark on their side, the article says. The new identity was unveiled on 7 January 2002, when the group name began to be styled “francetélévisions” in one word and La Cinquième became France 5.

The channel logos of 2002 were built from one shape. French Wikipedia describes a coloured trapezoid for each channel, red for France 2, blue for France 3 and green for France 5, recalling the red, green and blue of a screen, with the channel number in white set inside along the right-hand side. On 7 April 2008 the group moved to logos with a raised, three-dimensional effect, the same article says, and the group mark showed five symmetrical screens in five colours: red for France 2, blue for France 3, violet for France 4, green for France 5 and orange for France Ô.

The screens did not last. French Wikipedia says the arrival of the overseas network led the group to use a temporary logo showing all its channel logos above the group name, and that in October 2012 France Télévisions dropped them and kept only its name, set in one piece in two different weights to separate “France” from “télévisions”.

The present system arrived on 29 January 2018. Puremédias reported that morning that the new identity had gone on air at 6 a.m. that Monday under the line “Notre télé évolue, notre identité visuelle aussi”. The trapezoid shutters used since 2002 were gone, the report said, replaced by a dot at the start of each channel number. Each channel kept its colour, red for France 2, blue for France 3 and violet for France 4, but the shades were made brighter so that they would travel better on digital screens, Puremédias said, citing the franceinfo website. The agencies were Movement for the on-air look and Joosnabhan for brand strategy.

A numeral, a channel colour and a dot in front.

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.

A dot borrowed from franceinfo, a typeface and a regional line-up.

The 2018 dot did not appear from nowhere. Puremédias traced it to September 2016, when the new public news channel launched as franceinfo: with two small stacked yellow dots after its name, and to May 2017, when the group launched france.tv, a shared catch-up platform for all the channels that replaced the channels’ own replay sites and the Pluzz service. French Wikipedia says the 2018 identity was based on the dot introduced with france.tv. The dot moved from one channel and one platform to the whole group.

Type changed with it. Puremédias reported that the group adopted Brown in place of Heldustry, the same typeface already used by franceinfo. Setting every channel name in the typeface already used by franceinfo tied the older channels to the newest one.

The regional side of France 3 was part of the plan. According to Puremédias, the regional channels show the France 3 number with the name of the region beside it, on one line in most cases, or on two or three lines for longer names such as France 3 Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. The stated aim, the report said, was to help viewers recognise any France Télévisions programme, whether watched live or on demand. The same report quoted the franceinfo site saying that the dots would also appear on the group’s cameras and vehicles as equipment was replaced.

The colours outlived each change of shape. Red for France 2 and blue for France 3 date from Gédéon’s 1992 logos; green for France 5 and the trapezoids came in 2002; violet for France 4 appeared in the 2008 screens; and the 2018 package kept them all, only brighter. French Wikipedia adds that since 29 March 2022 a newer version of the group logo shows the “•tv” in the colours of the different channels, a version used on the online platform, the group website and on air.

The name itself has a small history too. It was France Télévision, singular, from 1992 until the holding company of 2000 added the “s”, and from 2002 it was written as one word. Since 2018 the france.tv name has done much of the day-to-day work, with the full group name kept for the company behind it.

For a design guide, France Télévisions shows how a family of channels can hold together through a numeral, a fixed colour per channel and one small shared device, here a dot, while the shapes around them change every few years. Compare Rai, the Italian public broadcaster that also gives each numbered channel its own colour, or the BBC, whose blocks the 2002 screens took as a starting point. For this guide we use red, blue, green and violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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