A Vancouver duo unearths Olympic gold
How a tiny Vancouver design studio is mining the IOC archives for a new line of Olympic-themed merchandise
Ben Hulse and Greg Durrell had little idea what they were getting themselves into two years ago when they accepted a commission from the International Olympic Committee to curate and codify the designs of past Olympic Games. The partners at Hulse & Durrell had worked together as part of the in-house design team for the Vancouver 2010 Games but, soon after the closing ceremonies, the brand they’d spent years developing effectively ceased to exist. They kept wondering, as Durrell puts it, “Why can’t you buy a polo shirt with the Olympic rings on it?”
As it happened, people within the International Olympic Committee were thinking along the same lines. The IOC, which ultimately holds the rights for past Games, knew there was likely a global market for decades’ worth of Olympic-themed merchandise. Yet the Lausanne, Switzerland–based organization had only a half-formed idea of how it might unlock the latent value of its own archival materials.
So Hulse & Durrell was hired to compile, digitize and edit all the emblems, pictograms, mascots and colour palettes from past Olympic Games into a catalogue of brand marks that could eventually be licensed and emblazoned on everything from clothing to coffee mugs.
The challenge was that the IOC’s digital archive was itself incomplete: it had only a rudimentary collection of historical materials—and some of those materials, especially older, pre-digital samples, contained errors. Roman numerals were cut off at the edge of the frame, fonts were inconsistent and colour gradients had inexplicably crept into the artwork. So the task grew to include sourcing vintage race bibs from collectors to confirm logo details, and deciding which of the many available shades of red would become the official hue used for modern reproductions of Japan’s rising sun emblem from the Tokyo 1968 Games. In many cases for the earliest Games, typefaces had been handpainted and were never standardized.
The pair could have just used the best materials on hand, but “we took this job really seriously,” Hulse says. It turned into a labour of love to get the Olympics’ design history right and to get it standardized for all time. The pair estimates they examined 25,000 different items in search of the elements worth keeping and reproducing.
“When you go through this work, you see the evolution of art and design over 120 years—the different styles, the different techniques,” Durrell says. The designers have their favourites: The Munich 1972, Tokyo 1964 and Los Angeles 1984 Games stand out. Tokyo and Munich, in particular, coincided with the graphic design profession’s coming of age, Hulse notes, when some now-universally recognized visual shorthands came into being, such as the men’s and women’s symbols on bathroom doors. But even the less noteworthy periods taught them something. Hulse likens the process to his past career as a musician: “When you cover a song you come to dissect it and understand why it was a hit even if you don’t like it. There was a similar process here.”
The pair’s work now forms the basis for what has been branded the Olympic Heritage Collection: a library of retro imagery just waiting to be deployed on everything from skateboards to teacups. The collection is now in the complex phase of being licensed across the IOC’s various national territories. The only place you can buy retro-styled Olympic gear so far is China—and royalty arrangements currently forbid their export. “It’s weird,” Durrell says. “We designed the line and we can’t even see it.”