Olympic Design - retro style
Every 4 years the ultimate global design
project comes around, a design that is seen by billions worldwide. The London
games identity has courted much discussion and seems to evoke strong opinions
and love it of hate it… it is now a part of our everyday culture.
The 1972 Olympics in Munich was my first
experience of the power of design and a structured approach to a corporate.
Beside the political events of that time, the thing that most stood out for me,
even at my early age was the very graphic approach that was taken to the
project – it was a real change from the previous Mexico games in 1968, with
it’s psychedelic style, designed by Lance Wyman (who got the inspiration for
the letters of the logo from the Olympic tracklanes)
It was not till much later that I
discovered that the lead designer was a German designer called Otl Aicher. A
forefather of the modernist style of design and the Swiss school of simplicity
and graphic treatment – he had previously designed the identity for Lufthansa
amongst other high profile identity programmes.
The colours and pure graphic treatment
of the 1972 graphic was a new look, a clear and structured approach to an
identity programme. The pictograms describingeach event were designed on a
diagonal grid, giving visitors a visual representation regardless of a language
barrier and all collateral was designed using a strong structured grid and
colour palette.
The colours were chosen to reflect the
tones of the Alps. The cool blues and white representing mountains and the
other colours that included green, orange and silver. The colours were used to
identify allocated themes such as media, technical services, celebrity
hospitality and public functions and each had a different colour so visitors
could differentiate the themes around the stadium and village.
Uniforms were colour coordinated to
represent these themes and Olympic staff could be identified as working for a
particular department by the colour they were wearing.
The simple use of Univers as a font and
the posterisation of the imagery created a pure graphic style that was a
relevation. Nothing had been done like this before – a structured and planned design
system that could be applied to everything from the tickets to the dachshund
mascot called Waldi. Everything was considered and everything as done to a
plan. A huge task when everything was done by hand – no computers in 1972.
Aicher’s designs still stand the test of
time now and are a blueprint for producing a complex corporate identity - A
true design classic.
Frazer Morgan
