From URI to EIAR, RAI and Radiotelevisione Italiana.

Rai is the Italian public broadcaster, known in full as Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana. Its history begins with radio. Italian Wikipedia says the company was born in 1924 as the Unione Radiofonica Italiana, or URI, formed from the merger of two radio companies, Radiofono and SIRAC, with Enrico Marchesi, formerly of FIAT, as its president. The Museo del Marchio Italiano, an online museum of Italian trademarks, gives the same merger in its history of the brand.

The service went on air in the autumn of that year. Italian Wikipedia says broadcasts began on 6 October 1924 at 9 p.m., with an opening announcement read by the violinist Ines Viviani Donarelli from a studio in Palazzo Corrodi in Rome. The programme ran for an hour and a half, the article says, with opera, chamber and concert music, a weather bulletin and market news.

The name changed several times before television arrived. Italian Wikipedia and the Museo del Marchio Italiano both give the sequence: EIAR, the Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche, in 1927; RAI, Radio Audizioni Italia, in 1944; and RAI – Radiotelevisione Italiana in 1954, when regular television began. Italian Wikipedia says the broadcaster was reopened in liberated Italy by a decree of 26 October 1944.

Television started at the beginning of 1954. Italian Wikipedia says regular broadcasts of the Programma Nazionale, today’s Rai 1, began at 11 a.m. on 3 January 1954, when the announcer Fulvia Colombo read a special announcement live from the studios in Milan. Because the company now did television as well as radio, the article says, Radio Audizioni Italiane changed its company name on 10 April 1954 to Rai – Radiotelevisione Italiana and took its legal seat in Turin.

Today Rai is based in Rome. Its channels are numbered, and the numbers sit at the centre of the identity, from Rai 1, Rai 2 and Rai 3 to the newer Rai 4. Fonts In Use described Rai in 2017 as the national public broadcasting company owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Two sculptures also belong to the picture of the company. Italian Wikipedia says Francesco Messina made the bronze Cavallo morente, the dying horse, in 1966 for the entrance of the main Rome headquarters, and that Mario Ceroli made the winged horse at the Saxa Rubra production centre in 1980.

Square letters, rounded capitals, a butterfly and a blue square.

The Museo del Marchio Italiano traces the Rai mark through its main stages, beginning with Erberto Carboni. The museum says Carboni designed the earliest RAI logo in its account, in 1948, with strongly squared letters and pronounced right-angled lines in the graphic taste of the time, and that he also designed the early television title sequences and the “TV” logo, which the museum dates to 1953. Italian Wikipedia says Carboni’s square-lettered logo was at first used only for radio and that he added the two stacked letters “TV” in 1954.

The second logo came from inside the company. According to the museum, Alberto Ribera, Rai’s in-house head of corporate graphics, drew it in 1970 in lower-case letters, still partly squared, with the round dot of the “i” matching the hooks of the “r” and the “a”. When colour broadcasts began in 1977, the museum says, the logo took on the red, green and blue of the light from a cathode-ray tube.

The third network brought a system. After the Terza Rete opened in 1979, the museum says, Rai needed a logo that could be varied for RaiUno, RaiDue and RaiTre. In 1983 Giorgio Macchi designed rounded, joined capitals with a symbol for each network: a blue sphere for RaiUno, a red cube for RaiDue and a green tetrahedron for RaiTre. Macchi restyled it in 1988, separating the letters so they could rotate in computer animation and adding the Italian flag, the museum says.

The turn of the century brought a figure-ground mark. The museum says Rai adopted a logo by Area Strategic in 2000, in which a butterfly made of two equal and opposite shapes alternates with two human profiles facing each other, with “Rai” in capitals set in Futura. Fonts In Use, writing on 19 May 2017, called this the “farfalla”, or butterfly, identity, credited it to Stefano Aureli, and said it brought the logos of the different channels into line, with Futura Bold as Rai’s main typeface from then on.

Digital television brought the square. The museum says that in 2010, with the switch to digital terrestrial broadcasting, Rai made its logos uniform as a rectangle of two squares: the acronym in white on a blue square, and the channel number in the second. The type was Aharoni, a Futura-style face; the marks were semi-transparent white so as not to mark plasma screens, and the rectangle suited a 16:9 picture. Fonts In Use dates the reversed acronym in a coloured square to May 2010.

An acronym in a square, a numeral and a colour per channel.

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.

The square becomes the protagonist, then the letters close up.

The current channel system dates from September 2016. Fonts In Use reported in May 2017 that the rebrand was launched that month under the direction of Massimo Maritan and Roberto Bagatti, creative directors at Rai. Italian Wikipedia ties the change to 12 September 2016, the day the streaming service RaiPlay went online, when the first four networks changed their graphics and the slogan “Per te. Per tutti.” replaced “Di tutto, di più”, a line in use until the day before.

The square from the corporate logo took the lead. In the words Fonts In Use quoted, the square “becomes the protagonist of the new look”: Rai 1 took a warm blue, Rai 2 became carmine with the square sharpened towards a rhombus, Rai 3 became light green with squares that multiply and intersect, and Rai 4 purple with a fragmented square. The channel numbers were set in a slightly modified ITC Lubalin Graph Bold, a typeface also used unaltered for other parts of the brand, the same report said.

The system then spread across the family. Fonts In Use said that in April 2017, working with the designer Florencia Picco, Rai extended the identity to its thematic channels, among them Rai 5, Rai Movie, Rai Sport and Rai Storia. Italian Wikipedia adds that the logos of all the networks were later moved to the top left corner of the screen, as the first four had done from September 2016.

The acronym itself had one more adjustment. The Museo del Marchio Italiano says that in 2018 Rai asked the Rome agency Flopicco to restyle the logo, to make the lettering work better as a whole without losing the recognition built by the 2010 mark. The change closed the gap between the “R” and the “a” to the width of the letter “i”, so that “Rai” reads as one compact, balanced word, the museum says.

Across a century, a few things recur. Carboni’s square letters of 1948, the square of 2010 and the square that became the protagonist in 2016 share a base shape; Futura has carried the lettering since 2000, and Aharoni, in the Futura line, set the 2010 marks; and channel colours, from Macchi’s blue sphere, red cube and green tetrahedron of 1983 to the blue, carmine and green of 2016, have marked the first three networks for decades.

For a design guide, Rai shows how a broadcaster can keep a short acronym and a simple geometric shape steady while handing each numbered channel its own colour and its own way of moving. Compare France Télévisions, which also codes its numbered channels by colour, or the BBC, another public broadcaster whose letters sit in squares. For this guide we use blue, carmine, green and purple with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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