Design Considered #09
Better branding for the Olympic Games, a stack of print material to get you offline, and a skatepark for the more adventurous...
#01 - Opening Thought
The trick to being a decent design editor simply involves spending as much time as possible with those who know much more about your interests than you. A ‘professional layman’ was the terminology that Richard Baird (founder of Logo Archive and BP&O, and more) and I coined as we sat down yesterday to speak about the Olympics branding. I’d been glued to the screen watching the Games and concluded that I didn’t dislike the 'reinvented’ pictograms denoting the different types of sports in Paris, but I didn’t love them either. The illustrative efforts, which the Games’ Paris 2024 President had described as “real badges of honour”, felt more like badges of boring to me. So, I sought the help of a branding expert in the form of Mr Baird to help me understand my feelings.
“For me, as a graphic designer, they seem ‘invisible’; so they’ve failed a bit. Elements like the stylistic flourishes aren’t needed—it’s a universal Games, and everyone should understand these drawings,” Baird explained as we tried to take educated guesses at what some of the sports being confusingly represented by the Pictograms were. “If it were good or interesting, my eyes would be drawn to it,” he added, noting that the Olympic Games’ graphic design aspects have felt increasingly watered down since Calgary in 1988. I concluded that ‘watering down’ can probably also be described as ‘compromising.’ It’s a modern problem—creating a branding device for something as mega and culturally significant as the Olympic Games often sees the safest option winning out when so many parties involved need satisfying.
Strong authorship marked the better branding of the Games in years past, with the design work around the Munich Olympics in 1972 getting the graphic design Gold Medal. These Games were buoyed by the modernist pictograms (pictured above) of Otl Aicher and his collaborators, including Gerhard Joksch. These icons became iconic in their own right and formed a template for the Games’ design in the years since—they were even designed to be reused, as seen when Calgary brought them back in 1988. But why do they work so well? “Continuity, clarity of meaning, and the fact that people love formality,” explained Baird. “Human brains like a formal language; we desire to see patterns in systems like this. If it’s too difficult to do so, we tend to reject them,” he said. “The Paris effort makes your brain work hard to understand it.” And there was my answer… Trying to understand the rules of fencing or gymnastics is difficult enough; my layman’s brain simply couldn’t comprehend what was happening with the confusing branding and sports simultaneously.
Back to the German genius Otl Aicher. His work was invisible in a different way compared to the Paris efforts; the designs were so intuitive that you didn’t have to think to understand the meaning. “There are so many brilliant aspects like the contrasting line weights—which put the person first and then the object, whether a bike wheel or a horse.” Strict in the way they stick to a grid, but playful all the same—with a touch of poetic design flair, the work offers a magnificently reductive approach to visual communication. Aligned with the post-war modernist movement, Aicher created a pictogram series that was not tied to national cliché but simply a finely tuned system. “They were democratic in the sense that they spoke to everyone, regardless of background, through a universal visual language.”
#02 - Design Selection
As Europe heats up, it might be a good time to reduce screen time (after finishing this newsletter) and head to the beach, park, or any sunny spot with a stack of good reading material. As we highlighted in last week’s design round-up, Santa & Cole are masters of lighting. What better way to complement the warm glow of the Spanish brand’s lamps than with finely designed books to read beneath them? The company publishes numerous books, and the 2024 editions of its titles on design masters (1) Arne Jacobsen and (2) Miguel Milá (the creator of several Santa & Cole classics) are perfect choices for your bedside table.
Self-publishing isn’t easy, so we should recognise the efforts of photographer Benedict Redgrove, whose (3) Auto Photo Manual has raised nearly a third of its six-figure target on Kickstarter. The best-looking book of the summer might not be strictly about design. Still, Belmond’s (4) Liguria, produced by Apartamento and featuring wonderful photography by Laura Jane Coulson, is a visual feast. Finally, Louis Kahn’s significant work in the United States is beautifully showcased in a new publication of his imaginative and emotionally potent sketches and writings, (5) Louis I. Kahn: The Last Notebook from Lars Müller Publishers. It wonderfully highlights his creative process, with a special emphasis on the masterful Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park in New York, finished in 2012, decades after his death.
#03 - Through The Lens
It took something of an Olympic effort to find the perfect view to photograph artist Raphaël Zarka and architect Jean-Benoît Vétillard’s beauty of a skatepark, Cycloid Piazza, which currently sits in front of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Definitely a design highlight of 2024 Games. “Before arriving on the site, I knew that shooting the installation from above would be one of the best options to reveal it entirely,” explains photographer Fred Mortagne, noting that the large piazza it temporarily occupies didn’t quite offer the right vantage points. “A friend of Raphaël sent him a picture of the Cycloid Piazza, shot from his artist studio on the 6th floor of a nearby building. This is where I took the picture. We were lucky—with skateboarding and the arts, there are always so many connections with people.”
Skateboarding and the arts certainly come together in this ‘skateable’ public structure, which is available for skating on (or admiring those skilled enough to do so) until mid-September. “I love everything Zarka does, from books to installations, sculptures, and paintings,” explains Mortagne, a passionate skateboarder. “We are excited about the same types of shapes and forms, which connect directly with skateboarding, curves, and diagonals—those you find in skateparks. The Cycloid Piazza is a great installation—it shows another aspect of skateboarding than the ultra-formatted one seen in the games.”