German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) – Corporate Design and Redesign of Website

The German Broadcasting Archive (DRA) is the first and oldest community institution of the combined public broadcasting authorities of Germany, a conglomerate known as the ARD (Consortium of Public Broadcasters of the Federal Republic of Germany). After it took on the programme assets of radio and television of the former German Democratic Republic, the DRA opened a second site alongside its pre-existing establisment in Frankfurt – on the premises of RBB (Berlin-Brandenburg's public broadcaster) in Potsdam-Babelsberg.

For the last 50 years, the DRA has played a comprehensive role as an archival and documentation centre. In order to fulfill these tasks, it uses diverse and modern infomation technology products. However, the evolution of its website and corporate designs over the years has been somewhat organic. We were tasked with the complete redesign and restructuring of the website; naturally, in close collaboration with our contractors.

The new website not only makes information easily available, it also invites visitors to browse through interesting articles and selected thematic archival contributions, which we have arranged into a "magazine-type" layout. Because it was imperative to have the website live as soon as possible, not all planned content and special offers could be prepared for October 2018. For this reason, we conceptualised a very modular structure, which makes it possible to gradually publish content still being processes, allowing for a lively and varied page layout with a high level of back-end automisation.

Parallel to this, in order to furnish the website with a truly modern design, we reworked the existing corporate design – which can now also be applied to print media. Technical implementation was realised in dialogue with the Typo3-Webteam from the DRA.