Like many others, I have been intermittently watching the Olympics. The Munich Olympics were the first I really registered. I find that the ‘event icons’ used there are very closely bound up with my experience of the games: many were so eonomically suggestive of the sport they represented that they seemed immediately ‘right’. I wondered why they had disappeared. This entry in Design Observer provides the background.
But it was eight years later that Otl Aicher, design director for the Munich 1972 games, developed a set of pictograms of such breathtaking elegance and clarity that they would never be topped. Aicher (1922-1991), founder of the Ulm design school and consultant to Braun and Lufthansa, was the quintessential German designer: precise, cool and logical. The design system he developed for the Munich games, all geometry, grids and Univers 55, is perhaps his greatest achievement. [Design Observer: writings about design & culture: The Graphic Design Olympics]
Spotted in xBlog: the visual thinking weblog.
