München 1972

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.

In 1966 Aicher was asked by the organisers of the Games to create a design for the Olympics that complemented the architecture of the newly built stadium in Munich designed by Günther Behnisch. After several stages - The Strahlenkranz was created, a garland that represented the sun but also the five Olympic rings merged together in a sprial shape. Designer Coordt Von Mannstein reworked Aichers original design through a mathematical calculation to amalgamate the garland and spiral together to get the final design.

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