The history of the Italian radio and television company, whose presence has characterized the life and customs of the country, must necessarily be traced back to the birth of the public radio service in 1924, the date on which the URI (Italian Radio Union) resulting from the merger was established in Rome between Radiofono (Italian Society for Circular Radiocommunications) and SIRAC (Italian Society for Circular Radio Auditions). After that of URI, the company took on other names over time: in 1927 EIAR (Italian Radio Auditions Body), in 1944 RAI (Italian Radio Auditions) and in 1954, with the regular television service, “RAI Italian Radiotelevision”. The first RAI logo was designed in 1948 by Erberto Carboni; it was characterized by strongly square letters and an accentuated use of orthogonal lines, according to the graphic trends of the time.
In addition to the logo and its applications on advertising pages, Carboni also studied the first television themes; his is also the “TV” logo of 1953.
The second logo was created in 1970 by Alberto Ribera, internal manager of Rai’s corporate graphics; the graphic sign had small letters, partly still strongly square, with curved lines particularly emphasized in the robust dot of the “i” equal to that of the hooks of the “r” and “a”. With color television broadcasts in 1977, the logo assumed the trio of colors (red, green and blue) of the light of the cathode ray tube.
With the inauguration in 1979 of the Terza Rete with both national and regional broadcasting, it became necessary to study a new logo that could be declined, to denote the diversification between them, in RaiUno , RaiDue and RaiTre. In 1983 Giorgio Macchi designed the new logo which was characterized by the three rounded capital letters, joined together, and by the three symbols that identified the three networks: blue sphere for RaiUno, red cube for RaiDue and green tetrahedron for RaiTre.
Competition from private networks and increasingly advanced computer animation techniques led the Rai managers in 1988 to request a restyling of the logo from Giorgio Macchi himself. The letters of the Rai logo were separated in order to facilitate their rotation and facilitate the three-dimensional effect; the Italian flag was also introduced. The type of font was redesigned compared to that of the previous logo but without altering the overall visual perception; in particular, the letters were rounded only in two diagonally opposite points for each letter. The result, compared to the previous version, was that of greater solidity, readability and modernity.
In 2000, in relation to the new scenarios of interactive communication, Rai adopted a new logo created by Area Strategic: through the optical illusion of the figure-background, a butterfly, consisting of two equal and opposite elements, alternates with two human profiles that look at each other and communicate immediately. The lettering carried the wording Rai capitalized and composed in Futura.
In 2010, in correspondence with the transition to digital terrestrial, Rai uniforms the logos using a rectangle made up of two squares: in the first blue the acronym appears in white while in the second the channel name in numbers. The font used is Aharoni, a variant of the Futura. The marks are semi-transparent white to prevent the overlay effect from occurring on plasma televisions and have a rectangular structure to adapt to the 16: 9 aspect ratio.
To coordinate the entire visual offer, in 2018 Rai entrusted the restyling of the logo to the Flopicco agency in Rome. The restyling was born from the need to make the lettering more functional as a whole without losing the recognition generated by the previous logo of 2010. The graphic intervention concerned the reduction of the distance between the letter “R” and the “a” equal to the width of the letter “i” so as to make the word Rai appear compact and balanced, giving the logo greater solidity and strength.
