Archive.fm
A volunteer foundation digitising four decades of pirate and community radio asked for a home that felt like the medium — urgent, homemade, alive — without turning the collection into a nostalgia gift shop.
Client
Archive.fm Foundation
Role
Art director
Services
Art direction · Web design · Type system
Year
2024
Pirate radio was never polite. The flyers were photocopied, the frequencies drifted, and the design — when there was design — was whatever the marker pen allowed. The archive holding its history shouldn't feel like a museum vitrine. It should feel like the signal got a domain name.
The visual language
We built the direction on three rules: type does the talking, every broadcast is a card you could imagine taped to a wall, and the accent color changes with the decade you're browsing. The grid is rigid; everything on it is slightly unruly — rotated labels, hand-set index numbers, timestamps in tape-deck mono.
Structure for 11,000 hours
- A broadcast card system that scales from a single show to a full station retrospective.
- Decade-keyed index pages, browsable like crate-digging rather than searching a database.
- A contributor kit so volunteers can catalogue new tapes without breaking the language.
It looks like the flyers we never kept. Volunteers cried. Twice.Mika Torres — Director, Archive.fm Foundation
The archive relaunched with 11,000 catalogued hours and tripled its volunteer applications in the first quarter — apparently the design made the work look like something worth joining.
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