The Graphic Design Olympics

Pictograms for the Munich Olympics, Otl Aicher, 1972

While watching the Olympics this past week, I noticed another competition. Hiding in and around the swimmers, vaulters, runners and shotputters swarmed a veritable Armageddon of logos. Front and center, of course, are the five interlocking multicolored rings that have symbolized the Olympics since the 1920s, designed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Movement. Based on patterns common in ancient Greece, the five rings represent Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and Oceania; every national flag in the world includes at least one of the five colors.

You would think that such a powerful, well established symbol would suffice. But no. The sponsoring city develops its own separate logo, usually after having developed an entirely different logo as part of the competition to host the games. Then competing nations develop their own logos, as do national teams, as do the official broadcasters. Then sponsors jockey for position, creating combinations of their own corporate logos with the Olympic entity they're sponsoring, resulting in a logo for, say, the Official Breath Mint of the 2004 Athens Olympics US Water Polo Team. All of these contraptions pay for the privilege of incorporating de Coubertin's pretty rings, usually submerged beneath a heap of other crap.

You wouldn't blame graphic designers for wanting to steer clear of this mess. But nearly 250 firms from 14 countries submitted proposals to design the symbol for the 2004 Olympics; the winning olive wreath ("kotinos") design is a collaboration between Greece's Red Design Consultants and Wolff Olins. The appeal, of course, has much to do with the prestige of the games, and even more, with graphic design triumphs from past Olympics. Of these, everyone has their favorites; here are my personal nominations for medals.

Gold: Otl Aicher, Munich, 1972

Pictograms have a long history, with figures like proto-information architect Otto Neurath playing major roles. They first appeared at the Olympics in London in 1948, and came into wide use, and necessarily so, in Tokyo in 1964, with a symbols for individual sports developed by Masasa Katzoumie and Yoshiro Yamashita.

But it was eight years later that Otl Aicher, design director for the Munich 1972 games, developed a set of pictograms of such breathtaking elegance and clarity that they would never be topped. Aicher (1922-1991), founder of the Ulm design school and consultant to Braun and Lufthansa, was the quintessential German designer: precise, cool and logical. The design system he developed for the Munich games, all geometry, grids and Univers 55, is perhaps his greatest achievement.

The pictograms were used once again, for the Montreal games, and then were licensed to ERCO . Since then, each Olympics has been given the more-or-less impossible task of topping Eicher's perfect ten with their own offerings. This has led to some renditions of surpassing corniness, with this year no exception.

Lest anyone get misty-eyed about design's Golden Age, according to one account Aicher's original "wreath of rays" symbol for the Munich games was rejected and opened to competition. Over 2,000 entries were considered and rejected before the Olympic committee returned to Aicher for a variation of his original solution.

Silver: Lance Wyman, Mexico City, 1968

Has any design scheme so perfectly caught the graphic spirit of the times as Lance Wyman's op-art influenced motifs for the 1968 Olympic games in Mexico City? Starting by incorporating the Olympic rings into the circular portions of the numbers 6 and 8 (taking liberties with the sacred symbol which have rarely been permitted since), Wyman, in collaboration with Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, architect and President of the Organising Committee for the Games, Eduardo Terrazas, worked out a geometric fantasia of concentric stripe patterns that expanded to engulf a custom alphabet, groovy minidresses, and eventually entire stadia.

Designed to be nothing if not of the moment, Wyman's aesthetic has proven surprisingly durable. As Peter Bilak has pointed out in dot-dot-dot 7, there's no mistaking the influence behind Armand Mevis and Linda van Deursen's 2003 identity for the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.

Bronze: Sussman/Prezja and Jon Jerde, Los Angeles, 1984

Trust Los Angeles to finally understand how to stage a modern Olympics: design it to be seen on television. So out with the costly white elephants of permanent venues built of steel and concrete: Deborah Sussman and Jon Jerde, working on a tight schedule and a tighter budget, led a team of designers that created one of the most cohesive Olympic design schemes ever. It was all Hollywood stagecraft, including fabric banners, painted cardboard shipping tubes and what was reportedly all the aluminum scaffolding west of the Mississippi.

The dazzling color scheme of the 1984 LA games, which Sussman dubbed "festive Federalism" was purportedly based on the hot pinks and oranges of southern California and Baja Mexico, but looked to American designers like a hyped-up reiteration of the prevailing West Coast design aesthetic led by Michael Vanderbyl and April Greiman. And why not? It was the ultimate California moment.

Sussman's brilliant success had a not-so-brilliant aftermath, as dozens of designers, developers, and local Chambers of Commerce burghers realized that they had been delivered a formula for civic identity on the cheap. This led to a "festive" profusion of garish banners and over-decorated wayfinding systems in every down-on-its-luck shopping mall and town square in America, all of whom hung the crepe and waited for a Hollywood close up that would never come.