Double Jay, 1540 on the AM dial, January 1975.

The station went to air before it had its present name. Writing for the University of Technology Sydney newsroom on 16 January 2025, the media scholar Dr Liz Giuffre dated the launch to 11am on 19 January 1975 in Sydney, under the name 2JJ, or Double Jay, and described a station born of the Whitlam government’s commitment to young Australians, run by the national broadcaster, the ABC. English-language Wikipedia gives the same hour and date, a Sunday, and says Double Jay broadcast on 1540 kHz on the AM band, largely within Greater Sydney.

Wikipedia traces the plan to the McLean Report of 1974, which recommended new FM broadcasting, a class of community radio licences and two new ABC stations: 2JJ in Sydney and the short-lived 3ZZ in Melbourne. It says Double Jay was intended as the opening link in a national youth network, a plan that stalled after the change of government later in 1975.

The opening minutes set out a style. Wikipedia says the opening presenter, Holger Brockmann, used his own name on air, began with a montage of sounds from the countdown and launch of Apollo 11, and opened with the words “Wow, and we’re away!” before playing Skyhooks’ “You Just Like Me ’Cos I’m Good in Bed”. Giuffre wrote that the song had been banned by commercial networks, and that the ABC, not beholden to advertisers, chose to start with it. Wikipedia adds that choosing an Australian band reflected the station’s commitment to Australian content. It describes a workplace in which presenters had wide freedom on air and staff took part in major policy decisions, with station coordinators and a programme coordinator running it as a kind of collective, and it names the singer-songwriters Bob Hudson and John J. Francis and the actor Lex Marinos among presenters who came from outside radio.

An FM move, a third J and a network that took two decades to fill in.

The extra J arrived with FM. Wikipedia says Double Jay began broadcasting on the FM band on 11 July 1980, at 105.7 MHz and again restricted to Greater Sydney, becoming 2JJJ, known as Triple J, and that AM transmissions ended on 19 January 1981. Giuffre dates the name change to 1981, when the station shifted to FM. To mark the relaunch, Wikipedia says, the station staged a concert in Parramatta Park on 18 January 1981 with Midnight Oil and Matt Finish.

The national network followed a decade later. Wikipedia says it was only in 1989 and 1990 that the ABC extended the station to Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Darwin, Hobart, Melbourne, Newcastle and Perth, followed by regional centres through the 1990s and Broome in 2005. Giuffre wrote that the move to become a national network started in 1990 and rolled out across the decade.

Several long-running formats date from those years. Wikipedia says the Hottest 100, an annual countdown of songs voted for by listeners, has been broadcast since 1989. Its talent search Unearthed began as a competition in 1996, according to Wikipedia, while Giuffre dates it to 1995; Wikipedia says the Unearthed website opened in 2006 as a place for unsigned Australian artists to upload music, and a digital radio station playing only that music followed in 2011. On 30 April 2014, Wikipedia says, the ABC’s Dig Music digital station was renamed Double J under the triple j umbrella. Wikipedia says the new station featured new music alongside material from triple j’s interview and sound archives.

Anniversaries have looked back to the opening day. Wikipedia records a one-off concert called Beat the Drum at the Domain in Sydney on 16 January 2015 for the fortieth, and Giuffre wrote in January 2025 that listeners who remembered the 1975 broadcast would be able to hear it again for the fiftieth.

A drum, a lower-case name and a news theme with a scratch in it.

A radio station often begins with a name it did not choose. Call letters, a frequency or a licence area can become the brand itself, and a set of numbers on a dial may end up carrying as much meaning as any wordmark. Because listeners mostly meet a station by ear, much of its identity is sonic: idents, jingles, stings and the voice that reads the time all repeat the name between records and shows. Visual design then has to catch up with something people already know by sound, translating a call sign or a spoken slogan into a logo that still works when it is reduced to a small icon on a phone screen.

The studio has turned into a visible stage. Webcams, live video streams and photographs of presenters at the desk let audiences see the room, and the furniture, the lighting and the logo on the wall behind the microphone become part of the look. Show artwork, weekly schedules and presenter portraits give each programme its own face inside the station’s system, so a grid of shows can feel varied while still belonging together. Apps, streaming players and archives of past broadcasts extend that system to screens of every size, and listings and event pages do similar work for music-media brands that cover club nights and concerts. Merchandise, from T-shirts and tote bags to posters and stickers, takes the name off the screen and into the street, where it travels further than the signal ever could.

Lower case since 1981, and a drum redrawn in 2024.

The name is written small on purpose. Wikipedia says the all-lower-case styling of triple j was a marketing decision made in 1981, and that the station’s marketing staff check press releases and posters to make sure it appears that way. Giuffre described the station in 2025 as the beating drum of generations of young Australians, “as its logo depicts”: the mark is a drum. Wikipedia gives the long-running slogan as “We love music”. It also treats the news theme as part of the brand: a remix of the ABC News theme, “Majestic Fanfare”, made in 1991 by Paul McKercher and John Jacobs, with a drum sample from Prince and a record scratch taken from an N.W.A track.

The drum was updated in 2024. B&T reported on 29 October 2024 that the station had unveiled a new visual identity created with the agency Howatson+Company, after the brand and logo had stayed unchanged for the previous fifteen years. According to B&T, the drum was given a simplified base designed to reference digital soundbars and to hold a hidden letter j. The agency also designed a custom variable typeface that changes in response to audio and musical input, trained through algorithmic machine learning, and used it to generate titles for programmes: the “Hottest” title was made from the top songs of recent Hottest 100 countdowns, and the title for the current affairs show Hack from sounds of its own episodes. B&T said the identity was launched at the station’s One Night Stand festival and rolled out across its assets through October, and it listed Scott Zuliani and Jared Wicker as the agency’s creative directors, with the new grid system and colour palette part of the work.

For a design guide, triple j shows how a public broadcaster can hold on to one symbol and one typographic habit across five decades, from an AM signal in Sydney to a national network, while letting a reactive typeface carry the change. Compare ABC, the national broadcaster that runs the station, and NPR, a public radio network in the United States. For this guide we use drumskin red, studio black and sunburnt sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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