Olympic design: Review
A pictorial design history of the Olympics
It’s often said that you don’t notice good design or bad design as much as you feel it, and there is no bigger stage to show it off than the Olympics. Anyone who has watched any Games on TV will recall sporting moments, with perhaps just a fleeting feel of a sense of place, or something as simple as just the colours. The design of each Games is now an epic challenge involving hundreds of people, all striving to serve many masters, from the international federations to the local transport authority. With the marketing of the Games increasingly geared towards a younger audience, designers are often forced into decisions to nod to the latest cause célèbre hipster aesthetic; this impulse led to the much-maligned London 2012 logo. However, sticking to outdated or overly conservative design work (whether you are a sovereign nation or just make stabilisers) is guaranteed to make your brand look like something from the past rather than the future. In particular, the radical simplicity of the design for the Tokyo 1964 Games is credited as a factor in rebranding the entire nation of Japan as a modern country that had emerged fully from a devastating war.
This immense book, nearly 800 pages across two hardbound volumes, draws extensively from the personal collection of Markus Osterwalder, a Swiss design historian who has made it his life’s work to collect the history of the Games as documented by what has been created for it. Everything about it is big; the package weighs in at more than 5kg and contains an astonishing 6,000 illustrations across 58 chapters. It covers every single Olympic competition, up to and including a limited amount of material on Tokyo 2020. Perhaps unsurprisingly, more of the material is weighted towards the 21st-century Games; the era when design became much more important and began to be documented in detail. The sheer comprehensiveness of the effort is a little overwhelming in places, and I would have liked to see a bit more analysis and interview, and perhaps fewer preliminary sketches of Vancouver 2010. Unless you are an obsessive student of design, it’s probably more something to dip into; but the colourful grid layout delights the eye on almost every page.
The complete item, in grey and gold hardback and complete with a slipcase, is really high quality and contributes to another heavyweight element: the price. The recommended retail price for Olympic Games: The Design is £175, although you can find it much cheaper. I can see this as a first-class, extra-special Christmas gift for a fan of the Games. For its stated aim, you certainly couldn’t accuse it of skimping on value.