RTÉ Archives

RTÉ Archives house Ireland's largest audiovisual collection, taking care of radio and television records of Irish life. The project’s main focus was delivering selected parts of this archived content to the public online. A daily feed of archived audio, video, image and documents was seen as the best way to let the public access the archived material – clips could be themed by the date (‘on this day‘), or reflect current trends or topics in the news (’history repeats itself’).

The site was built to be fully responsive, with an intuitive search function, allowing users to find published archive material while trying to convey that not every episode of every TV or radio programme was available online.

The brand and identity for the Archives was designed to match this new online presence, with the mark itself being responsive – the full logotype is used on desktop/tablet devices and the mark/symbol used on smaller devices. This gave the identity a great deal of flexibility across different media, with social networks being important drivers. The logotype pays homage to RTÉ logos of the past, while the mark is a playful ‘play-back’ symbol.

The Archives green was updated to be both contemporary and timeless. Categories were colour-coded to help users navigate easily across different stories or exhibitions. Avenir Next and Simple were chosen as typefaces for the clarity and simplicity, along with mono-line icon sets derived from the multi-line logo.