ORF SOUND: Audio streaming platform with curated content
Starting point
What it was about
ORF SOUND is the audio streaming platform of the Austrian public broadcaster. It brings twelve radio brands together: three national and nine regional, each with its own editorial team, its own audience and its own logo. A dedicated SOUND editorial team curates freely from all of it and assembles the audio content itself.
The task was to unite these twelve brands in one interface without taking the stations' editorial identity away from them. Twelve logos side by side would have split the platform into twelve areas. An interface with no distinction at all would have made the stations invisible.
SOUND was the first project in the organization for which a design system was developed.
The process
A color role instead of a logo
A semantic color theming system took the place of the twelve station logos, anchored in the design system. Each brand is given a color role instead of a logo. The components reference that role. The platform looks the same everywhere, and you can still tell which station a piece of content comes from.
The effect goes beyond appearance. When a brand sits in the system as a color and not as an image in the interface, content can be assembled by topic instead of by station. A topic can carry pieces from several stations without falling apart into several separate sources.
Underneath sits a semantic component logic: colors, states and spacing are defined as roles, not as fixed values. Added to that were accessibility requirements to WCAG and processes for quality assurance and design governance, agreed with product, editorial and engineering.
The framework was not built for SOUND alone but laid out so that it can carry further products.
Outcome
What it achieved
Twelve radio brands run on one platform without any of them disappearing. Content can be curated by topic instead of by station. A new brand or a new format does not need another logo in the interface, only a color role in the system. The same foundation now carries ORF ON, the ORF video streaming platform.